Cowboys and Cattletowns Yellow Brick Road Trip
The larger-than-life cowboy legends of the Old West were born on the frontier plains and in the cattletowns of Kansas. Wichita grew from a cattletown to the largest city in the state and few towns capture the spirit of the American cowboy like Dodge City. The Old West still lives in many other Kansas communities as well - Abilene, Newton, Caldwell and Ellsworth all keep the cowboy culture alive year-round!
Robert Rebein: Dragging Wyatt Earp - August 4, 2013
Author Robert Rebein explores what it means to grow up in, leave, and ultimately return to the iconic Western town of Dodge City in a discussion of his new book.
The essays that make up 'Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City' range from memoir to reportage to revisionist history. Rebein contrasts his hometown's Old West heritage with a New West reality that includes salvage yards, beefpacking plants, and bored teenagers cruising up and down Wyatt Earp Boulevard.
Top 10 Places to Visit in Kansas
Top 10 Places to Visit in Kansas
Geographically, Kansas is situated in the center of the United States. That’s just one of the many reasons, however, that Kansas is known as the Heart of America. The state of Kansas is a slice of Americana, boasting the scenery of the Monument Rocks along with plenty of history. Kansas offers a lot more than just fields of wheat and sunflowers. This prairie state has a colorful history, sprawling grasslands and sophisticated urban centers for travelers to explore. Kansas offers some of the most beautiful and spectacular sights and places to visit!
#1.Wichita
#2.Smoky Valley Ranch & Little Jerusalem
#3.Eisenhower Presidential Library
#4.Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve
#5.Oz Museum
#6.Monument Rocks
#7.Cosmosphere
#8.Dodge City
#9.S.P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden
#10.Fort Scott National Historic Site
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
Real men don't take guff from snotty kids. Neither does Disko Troop, skipper of the We're Here, a fishing schooner out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, when his crew fishes Harvey Cheyne out of the Atlantic. There's no place on the Grand Banks for bystanders, so Harvey is press-ganged into service as a replacement for a man lost overboard and drowned. Harvey is heir to a vast fortune, but his rescuers believe none of what he tells them of his background. Disko won't take the boat to port until it is full of fish, so Harvey must settle in for a season at sea. Hard, dangerous work and performing it alongside a grab-bag of characters in close quarters is a life-changing experience.
Chapter 1 - 00:00
Chapter 2 - 28:17
Chapter 3 - 1:06:04
Chapter 4 - 1:48:53
Chapter 5 - 2:22:53
Chapter 6 - 2:54:16
Chapter 7 - 3:13:36
Chapter 8 - 3:30:31
Chapter 9 - 4:15:26
Chapter 10 - 5:05:05
Read by Mark F. Smith (
Auburn Coach Wife Kristi Malzahn Agrees with Match & eHarmony: Men are Jerks
My advice is this: Settle! That's right. Don't worry about passion or intense connection. Don't nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling Bravo! in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year. (It's hard to maintain that level of zing when the conversation morphs into discussions about who's changing the diapers or balancing the checkbook.)
Obviously, I wasn't always an advocate of settling. In fact, it took not settling to make me realize that settling is the better option, and even though settling is a rampant phenomenon, talking about it in a positive light makes people profoundly uncomfortable. Whenever I make the case for settling, people look at me with creased brows of disapproval or frowns of disappointment, the way a child might look at an older sibling who just informed her that Jerry's Kids aren't going to walk, even if you send them money. It's not only politically incorrect to get behind settling, it's downright un-American. Our culture tells us to keep our eyes on the prize (while our mothers, who know better, tell us not to be so picky), and the theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is—look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality.
Even situation comedies, starting in the 1970s with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and going all the way to Friends, feature endearing single women in the dating trenches, and there's supposed to be something romantic and even heroic about their search for true love. Of course, the crucial difference is that, whereas the earlier series begins after Mary has been jilted by her fiancé, the more modern-day Friends opens as Rachel Green leaves her nice-guy orthodontist fiancé at the altar simply because she isn't feeling it. But either way, in episode after episode, as both women continue to be unlucky in love, settling starts to look pretty darn appealing. Mary is supposed to be contentedly independent and fulfilled by her newsroom family, but in fact her life seems lonely. Are we to assume that at the end of the series, Mary, by then in her late 30s, found her soul mate after the lights in the newsroom went out and her work family was disbanded? If her experience was anything like mine or that of my single friends, it's unlikely.
And while Rachel and her supposed soul mate, Ross, finally get together (for the umpteenth time) in the finale of Friends, do we feel confident that she'll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames. It's equally questionable whether Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw, who cheated on her kindhearted and generous boyfriend, Aidan, only to end up with the more exciting but self-absorbed Mr. Big, will be better off in the framework of marriage and family. (Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)