This is what I want to share with everybody today! This is Sheridan's newest web site, and it's all about one of my favorite places - the town I call home: Sheridan, Wyoming.

The site is also the newest venture of my employer - Sheridan Media, which is a news agency that includes nine radio stations and an online news site (Sheridan Media-dot-com).

Sheridan Wyoming-dot-com went live the day after Christmas, and I think the site is gorgeous! If you've ever been curious about life along the Big Horn Mountains, you can find the answers here in one comprehensive web site. I fell in love with Sheridan the first time I saw the area, more than 20 years ago, and this web site will show you why. The area's history and historic places, arts and entertainment, the annual events, and of course the outdoor recreation - camping, fishing, hunting, horseback and trail riding ...

You can also find out about real estate, schools, the medical community, lodging facilities and restaurants - all the information you need if you're thinking of moving here, or just coming for a visit.

Here's the URL: www.SheridanWyoming.com

I hope you'll check it out. And ... If you like it or decide to come to Sheridan for a visit ... Let me know.

Yesterday was a bittersweet day for me. A great day – because I went to see the third Hobbit movie – The Battle of the Five Armies. A sad day – because that's the last of the Hobbit movies. A farewell to Middle Earth.

Except, of course, in reruns. I do have all the other movies on CD, and I plan to get Battle as soon as it becomes available.

As with the earlier two Hobbit movies, director Peter Jackson brings in some characters that Tolkien didn't introduce until The Lord of the Rings. There's a foreshadowing of The Lord of the Rings – something I think Tolkien himself would have done if he had written The Hobbit with LOTR already in mind.

I have to say, one of my favorite scenes involves the arrival of Thranduil, leader of the wood elves, who is riding … Well, I won't spoil the surprise for those who haven't seen the movie. Suffice to say that horses aren't the only steeds of choice in Jackson's world.

As in all of Jackson's “Middle Earth” movies, the settings and the action are breathtaking. And yes, I will go see this movie again if I get a chance, because there's just a lot to see and take in. If you're a fan of Tolkien, and of Jackson's take on Tolkien, this is another must-see film.

In the late 1700s, one of the British East India Company's finest ships wrecked on the wild, then-unexplored coast of southeast Africa. The Grosvenor – 741 tons, a three-masted square-rigger reported to be “bristling with cannons” – was doomed. But most of her crew – 91 men – and all 34 passengers, including women and children, survived the wreck and reached the shore in safety.

What happened to them next is the subject of author Stephen Taylor's account. The book has been published under two titles – The Caliban Shore in 2004, and Caliban's Shore in 2005 – but under either title, this is a gripping tale of a true event that is as amazing as anything a writer of fiction could imagine. Mr. Taylor draws upon unpublished material and (at the time the book was written) new research, weaving together anthropology, social history and adventure in a story of people rising to heroism and, too often, sinking to less-than-heroic depths.

Don't expect to be plunged immediately into action. Mr. Taylor takes some time to set the scene for the catastrophe that is to come. What you can expect, with a bit of patience, is a tale of people far from home – hundreds of miles, in fact, from the nearest European outpost – and struggling to survive in an incomprehensible land. That's a word, in fact, that the author uses in describing the survivors' discovery that they were not alone on this unknown shore: “They surveyed one another with mutual incomprehension: on the one hand, the disheveled castaways; on the other, black warriors with high conical hairstyles, daubed with red mud ...”

Some of the survivors eventually returned to England. But not all. The author tells of the fates, and probable fates, of both groups. He reaches to the heart of the mystery in a story that is compelling, disturbing, and that will haunt your thoughts long after you close the book on the last page.