Once upon a time there were a couple of fellas in the Desert Southwest who ate, slept, worked, and called and killed coyotes. This was long ago, before the Internet or desktop P.C.'s or any other stuff like that.

Then the world changed, and one day one of these fellas (The hard-headed, not-too-bright one) got a computer and hooked up to the 'Net, and everything began to go south in a hurry.

These two fellas (Mostly the hard-headed, not-too-bright one, but he made the other fella follow) posted a Website out there in Cyberland to teach other fellas how to call and kill coyotes, and before they knew it they had become semi-famous (or is the word "notorious?") At any rate, the hard-headed, not-too-bright fella, instead of leaving well enough alone, or better yet canceling his I.S.P. account and pulling the plug on the damned infernal machine and going back into the brush to kill more coyotes, decided that what they really needed to do was to make a predator calling video.

This was met with a raised eyebrow from the other fella (The one with the steady job, lovely wife, and home mortgage) but before they knew it these two fellas were up to their eyebrows in cameras, tripods, wireless microphones and headsets, film, lenses, and all the other stuff that they thought might come in handy, and coyote calling had changed from a pleasurable leisure-time activity to a pain-filled, wrenching, agonizing experience, filled with cursing and recriminations directed at the equipment, the coyotes, and sometimes each other.

But they persevered, and in a year or so they had amassed enough film that they began to think about actually producing the thing, and that was when the first fella (who has a certain talent for effortlessly making bad situations worse) decided that instead of the old cut-and-paste film editing methods that you had to pay a professional for, what they really needed to do was buy a bunch more expensive and incomprehensible gadgetry and edit it themselves with the aid of the the same desktop computers that had gotten them into the mess to begin with.

As a result there were more raised eyebrows, more cursing and recriminations, and lots more time while they tried to figure out how in the hell to make all of the stuff work together, much less how to actually make a video with it, and when that was finished they confronted yet another simple and brutal truth that had somehow eluded them up until that point, namely, that while they might be pretty fair hands at coyote killing, this video thing was ART, by God, and artsy was not a term that sprang readily to mind when describing either one of them.

But they persevered once more, and now the long chase drawth nigh (To quote Francis Thompson in "The Hound of Heaven", which I highly recommend to other madmen out there, having fled Him down the nights and days until I'm dizzy) and the video might actually be done and mastered and dubbed and available for sale before my teeth fall out.

I've been playing with streaming video a little bit, and I've created some clips for your delectation and enjoyment and stuff. Streaming video is one of those "immature technologies" that market analysts talk about, and after fooling with it for a while I can see why. These clips don't properly "stream" at all, and the reason is (well, the reason is incomprehensible, bye and large, but it has to do with compression algorithms and modem speeds and all sorts of other stuff) but if you click on the "play" button in the RealPlayer window and wait a while something ought to happen, hopefully sooner than later.

If I can figure out all of my capture resolutions, my compression settings, and where I put my boots last night, you might actually be able to see something besides blurs moving around the screen. But what the heck; it keeps me from chasing fat girls in the local honky-tonks and drinking whisky until I fall down.