HORRIBLY BAD BOOK SCENES

ROPERS AND HORSE PEOPLE WILL LOVE THIS ONE!

This post will resonate with ropers and horse people especially, but anyone with ANY common sense should be able to figure out how horrendous this contrived scene is from a book I recently managed to struggle through all the way to the end.

The author is long dead, so I can’t ruin his finances by mentioning his name, and in order to save my fans from the experience I had ….

BURT ARTHUR!

The whole book wasn't great, in many ways I won’t even go into here, but this one scene alone insured that I would RUN, not walk, from any book I ever saw again with this author’s name on the cover.

Let me see if I can find a succinct way to describe this …

So... the "bad guy", we'll call him, is a rich banker. He is mounted on a horse of the type you would expect a rich banker to ride. That is to say, a supposedly FAST, expensive horse.

He decides to cheap shot the "good guy, we'll call him, and he hits him across the face with his apparently super-long reins while said "good guy" is standing on the ground.

Then the cowardly "bad guy" IMMEDIATELY turns and lays spurs to his horse (his really fast, expensive horse, which probably runs (to be kind to this author) over 30 miles an hour.)

So .... the 'good guy" reels back from the pain and hits the wall of the house. He is described as taking some time to "recover", basically shaking his head, blinking his eyes, etc. Let's give him say 5 seconds to do all that, assuming he is the same super human he continues to be throughout the scene.

He then lurches to where another guy just HAPPENS to be holding a coiled lasso. Follow me? He takes said lasso out of that man's hands, builds a loop, and twirls it in the air around his head--you know, to keep the loop open. Let's pretend that he is really super duper fast, and that this second process ONLY took another 5 seconds.

We now have a total of 10 seconds, correct?

At this point, he throws the loop at the receding bad guy on the super-fast horse.

Now, I don't know about you, but back when I was younger, say 30 to 38 years old, and was doing a lot of sprinting--and mind you, I was pretty fast for a big guy--I could cover a hundred-yard football field from end zone to end zone in UNDER ten seconds. Okay?

Well, I am not a fast, expensive horse. I am a mere human.

I'm sure you already guessed that the end result is the "good guy" dabbed that loop on the "bad guy" and roped him OFF that horse.

Any horse people reading this? In real life, in that miraculous ten seconds (which we know would really be longer than ten, for everything that author recounted) how far away is even a MEDIOCRE horse by then?

Furthermore, how long is the LONGEST lasso you have ever seen?

I guess I don't need to tell you that a reata, or lasso, which I've never heard of being over a FREAK 110, MAYBE 120 feet or so long, and that is RARE, might have been catching a clump of sagebrush in that book scene, but unless that "bad guy" had decided to rein his horse around and around in circles, he probably wasn't within a quarter-mile of the roper by the time the roper, our "hero", successfully roped him off that horse.

NOW you know why I VERY seldom can stomach reading most people's so-called "Westerns". I mean quite frankly, even some math teacher who never saw horse run in his entire life or ever even HELD a lasso should have been able to see how hokey this scene was, and yet of course the writer, who obviously knew absolutely NOTHING about horses or roping, and the New York editor, just allowed this stupidity to pass into the annals of printed Western literature.

Man. No WONDER a lot of people scoff at the entire Western genre, when authors of Burt Arthur's ilk were busily disrespecting their readers with inane scenes like that!

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