Today's paper had a story that a former TV weatherman from Las Vegas died the other day in hospice care. He was 57, and died of cirrhosis. He was a popular television personality and famous for bringing his golden lab Jordan to the set with him. Jordan died in 2008 and there was a replacement called Little Jordan, or LJ. It wasn't the same, though, because LJ was just a puppy and he didn't know how to behave on the TV set. His owner missed Jordan the first so much he started drinking, interfering with his job performance, and then Little Jordan was banned from the set for an alleged biting incident.

Finally, in 2008, the TV station and the weather guy agreed that he would leave the job, supposedly to write a book about Jordan. But it was more about the alcohol problem. He had read the book about fly fishing in Montana "A River Runs Through It" so he decided to move to Missoula, Montana. He struggled there, and the only job he could find paid $9 an hour for cleaning out 150 cat litter boxes every morning. He was getting around on a scooter and he'd taught Little Jordan to ride on the floor boards. But after a couple of accidents driving on the ice with the dog, and some other problems, he decided to move back to Las Vegas to see if he could get a new start.

Back in town here, he discovered that squatters had stripped his house and he didn't have the money to fix it. Finally, some good samaritan gave him the money to get the water, electricity, and heat fixed so he would have a home.

He always told people that his family had a curse, and none of them had lived past age 52. One of his sisters died of a heroin overdose, and another sister called to tell him she'd beat the curse and reached her 53rd birthday, only to die a month later from alcoholism. He beat the curse by five years, I guess that was something, although not much.