Bat's philosophy

 
  
Well, Innumerable Readers, the end of another year arrives. We can’t wish you Merry Christmas or even Happy Holidays anymore, since those terms have been forever sullied by religious sectarianism. Even though History is Dead and High-Tech/Bio-Tech Growth remains the Only Faith of the One Voice of Merced, home to a new UC campus, built where rain will never more percolate into the city’s aquifer, there is still Philosophy. So, we offer for the end of the year, a few insights by that great American philosopher, William Barkley “Bat” Masterson, 1853-1921, Buffalo hunter, cowtown sheriff, gunfighter, gambler, and sports writer:
 
"Every dog, we are told, has his day, unless there are more dogs than days."
"New York is the biggest boomtown there is. They will buy any damned thing here."
"When a man is at the racetrack he roars longer and louder over the twenty-five cents he loses through the hole in the bottom of his pocket than he does over the $25 he loses through the hole in the top of his pocket."
"There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I can't see it that way." (These were also Masterson's last recorded words, which were in the bit of column found on the typewriter Masterson was using before he died while typing).