There is no Roundup today. We are on vacation this week in the Great American West, visiting friends who once blithely suggested, “Oh! Come visit us sometime!” never suspecting we would take them up on it.
No time in these few days to write a proper roundup of current events.
Nevertheless, I know how the absence of this weekly tirade would upset your carefully arranged weekend schedule and plunge you into fits of depression. So I make this humble offering as weak substitute.
I turned to ChatGPT with a short description of last month’s weekend with family, and asked it to re-write it for entertainment.
First, here is my prompt:
Just for fun, re-write the following description of my family reunion in Colorado (last week) in the voice of a dark gothic romance.
My wife and I drove to a small town in Colorado's front range for a family reunion with the Ghormley clan. We stayed 3 nights at a rustic campgrounds which serves mainly church groups. There were a couple of other groups there at the time, along with the 30 of us.
Our group included cousins, not just immediate family, and we were regaled with stories of their humble roots in the salvage business.
We engaged in local activities, including miniature golf, a climbing wall, and a walking trail in the woods. We also went into town a couple of times to see an impressive dinosaur fossil exhibit, a site showing how live wolves are being reintroduced to Colorado (which scares me!), and other walking trails focused on historic cabins.
The food served at the camp was surprisingly good. During the evenings we heard presentations on deceased Ghormleys from many years past.
I am tempted to call our next meeting "The Dead Ghormley Moot."
And here is the ChatGPT response:
The Dead Ghormley Moot
My wife and I journeyed into the shadowed folds of Colorado’s Front Range, where the mountains stand like ancient sentinels, keeping secrets older than memory. There, in a quiet village half-forgotten by the hurried world, the scattered branches of the Ghormley bloodline gathered once more.
Our lodging was no polished inn, but a weathered camp hidden among dark pines—a place accustomed to church pilgrims seeking light, though one could not help suspecting that older spirits had laid claim to it long before the hymns arrived. Other bands of travelers wandered its grounds, yet our own company of thirty seemed set apart, as though summoned by some inheritance not entirely of this world.
It was not merely parents and children who assembled, but cousins whose faces bore unsettling echoes of forgotten ancestors. Around the tables were told the stories of the family’s humble beginnings in the salvage trade—a curious occupation, when one reflects upon it. For what is salvage, after all, but the rescue of relics abandoned by the dead? The tales lingered in the air with the weight of iron and dust, as though every rusted beam and weathered tool still remembered the hands that once had held them.
By daylight we sought diversion. We struck tiny balls across improbable fields of miniature golf, scaled a climbing wall that rose like the ramparts of some forsaken fortress, and wandered woodland paths where every whispering pine seemed to caution us against straying too far.
We descended upon the nearby town to gaze upon the colossal bones of creatures long swallowed by eternity, their hollow eyes fixed forever upon a world that had forgotten them.
Most unsettling of all was the exhibit celebrating the return of living wolves to Colorado. The placards praised restoration. I quietly calculated the distance to the nearest parking lot.
We also visited lonely cabins left standing from another age, their rough-hewn walls creaking softly beneath the mountain wind, as though reluctant to reveal who—or what—might once have crossed their thresholds after sunset.
The meals served at camp proved unexpectedly excellent, a fact which only deepened the mystery. One rarely expects such hospitality in places where the forest seems perpetually poised to reclaim the buildings before breakfast.
Yet it was the evenings that belonged to the past.
One by one, members of the clan rose to recount the lives of Ghormleys who had departed this earthly shore many decades before. Their names, spoken aloud once again, drifted through the meeting hall until it seemed impossible to say whether we were remembering them... or inviting them.
The room grew strangely still. The old photographs stared back with knowing expressions. Shadows lengthened.
By the final night, I found myself wondering whether next year’s reunion ought to abandon all pretense and simply embrace its inevitable title:
The Dead Ghormley Moot
Attendance, I suspect, may exceed expectations.
And thanks for joining The Not Alligator News Roundup for Friday, August 7, 2026. I’ll be back next week if I don’t fall into a rattlesnake-infested canyon.
Have a good weekend!
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