A muleteer. or driver of mules as pack animals, can also be known as a muleskinner, a more informal term. The term muleskinner means someone who can “skin”, or outsmart, a mule. Which may be hard to do, as mules are very smart animals, but notoriously uncooperative. The first “e” of “muleteer” (but not of “muleskinner”) is pronounced, giving both words three syllables.
“Mule Skinner Blues” (a.k.a. “Blue Yodel #8”, “Muleskinner Blues”, and “Muleskinner’s Blues”) is a classic country song written by Jimmie Rodgers and George Vaughan. The song tells the tale of a down-on-his-luck mule skinner, approaching “the Captain”, looking for work (“Good Morning, Captain / Good Morning to you, son. / Do you need another muleskinner on your new mud line?”). He boasts of his skills: “I can pop my 'nitials on a mule’s behind” and hopes for “a dollar and a half a day”. He directs the water boy to “bring some water round”.
Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer mistakes Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman) for a muleskinner in the 1970 revisionist Western film Little Big Man, and hires him to work as a civilian contractor for the 7th Cavalry.
The city of Bishop CA, south of Mono Lake, annually celebrates the mule and its role of early settling of the steep Sierra Nevada Mountain Range area. Every year on Memorial Day Bishop holds its Mule Days fair. Bishop hosts the largest non-motorized parade in the United States on Memorial Day, with all power supplied by mules.
The cleaning product “20 Mule Team Borax” is named for the Twenty-mule teams. These were teams of eighteen mules and two horses attached to large wagons that ferried borax out of Death Valley from 1883 to 1889. They traveled from mines across the Mojave Desert to the nearest railroad spur, 165 miles (275 km) away in Mojave.
“Stubborn as a mule” notwithstanding, a mule is less stubborn than a donkey. Mules have smaller feet than a horse, which limits their utility in terrain with soft earth. They became the iconic draft animal in Missouri, where there is unusual clay content in the topsoil. The US military found them useful in the rocky soils of central Europe. Mules are held to be smarter than horses, and their stubbornness attributable to their having better sense than their drovers, and resistance to self-endangering commands.
The Mule is a fictional character from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Science Fiction series. One of the greatest conquerors the galaxy has ever seen, he is a mentalic who has the ability to reach into the minds of others and “adjust” their emotions, individually or en masse, using this capability to conscript individuals to his cause. Ultimately, however, the Second Foundation succeeds in defeating the Mule, transforming him into a relatively harmless individual.
The Foundations, who had the hit singles “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” and “Build Me Up, Buttercup” in the 60s, was the first multi-racial group to have a #1 UK single. Despite it’s Motown-like sound, all the members were born in the UK or in British colonies.
In 1986, the then-young actress Robin Wright was listed as one of twelve “Most Promising New Actors of 1986” in John Willis’ Screen World. The next year she starred in her first feature film as the leading lady in director Rob Reiner’s romantic comedy fantasy film, The Princess Bride as Princess Buttercup.
“Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded”, by Samuel Richardson, published in 1740, is widey held to be the prototype of the “romantic novel”.
Gadsby is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright that revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized as a result of the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth group he organizes. However, the novel is most remembered because nowhere in the novel’s 50,110 words will you find a single “e”
Works written without using one or more letters are called lipograms.
Wow - not a single E. Might be painful to read.
In play: South Dayton, New York is a nondescript town about a 1:30 drive south of Niagara Falls. It’s closer to Erie PA. South Dayton’s train depot appeared in two films, The Natural (1984), and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987).
In The Natural it was the train’s water stop where Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford) struck out “The Whammer” (Joe Don Baker).
Ninja’d. My play is this: sentences that include all 26 letters of the alphabet are called pangrams. Two pangrams are:
***The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
Quick movement of the enemy will jeopardize six gunboats.***
Mules also saw extensive U.S. Army service in the Southwest before World War I. One old Quartermaster Corps story had a fully-laden mule falling irretrievably into a rocky crevasse. The crooked QM realized he could use the loss of the mule to explain all sorts of irregularities in the regimental books. By the time he finished his tally of “lost supplies,” the story goes, the mule was supposedly carrying four tons.
In play:
“The Whammer” in The Natural was not-too-subtly based on Babe Ruth, born on February 6, 1895 to a Baltimore saloonkeeper and his wife.
Missed edit window to correct:
***A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Quick movement of the enemy will jeopardize six gunboats.***
Double ninjas! What to do?
I’ll have a go:
Babe Ruth during the height of his career was 6’2" and 215 lbs (or 97,500 grams). Near the end of his career and in retirement he ballooned to over 250 lbs (113,400 grams)
He must’ve had too many Baby Ruth candy bars, haha.
Mickey Mantle died of liver failure. He was only 63 years old. Ironically for him, while his Mickey Mantle’s Country Cookin’ restaurants failed in the early 1970s, his Mickey Mantle’s Restaurant & Sports Bar opened in New York at 42 Central Park South (59th Street) in 1988, and it became one of New York’s most popular restaurants. His original Yankee Stadium Monument Park plaque is displayed at the front entrance.
An additional 35 pounds is not an unusual weight increase for a retiring professional athlete. Ruth, in spite of his rotund aspect , was among the faster runners in baseball at the time. During his career, he stole 123 bases, with a season high of 17.
Baby Ruth candy bars were named for Ruth Cleveland, the daughter of the president, 17 years after she died. But it is suspected that the candy company was simply avoiding paying royalties to the ball player, who had just emerged (1921) as baseballs most popular figure.
Young Baby Ruth Cleveland died at the age of 12 in 1904. She was the eldest of Grover’s children, and she rests in Princeton Cemetery, not the Princeton Cemetery in Princeton, Arkansas but the one in Princeton NJ. Both of her parents rest there, and so too does Aaron Burr.