Diablo Family Shame

In 1942 after he had been married 9 times, Uncle Poot moved in with a "bachelor" friend. They spent many years together modeling for the meat industry.

Uncle Poot and His 9th Wife

Uncle Poot said she made all her clothes out of leftover car upholstery. She left him because she said he was a goat.

Uncle Poot was a Serious Man

Poor Uncle Poot was an drunk and a ne'er-do-well. But he was delighted whenever two similar patterns or colors overlapped or butted up against on another. He could stare at his light yellow polyester pants for hours if he accidentally dropped a dollop of butter on his crotch.

Pink Worry

Is the Diablo family story of Pinky's birth a lie? Was he not born in a hurricane after all? Pinky recently found this photograph hidden in Pableau X's underwear drawer with a note pinned to it:"Do not let Pinky see!!!!!" Pinky had once heard that his dear Papa had been a petroleum engineer before becoming a poet. Pinky turned the note over and on the back was written: "After creating such a monstrosity, I must forsake this devilish career they call science." At least Pinky knows now why he has such a fascination with jars.

Pinky Can Tell Who was Mean to Granny D as a Little Girl by Looking in the Family Album

Here Actors Portray Pinky and Miss Love in Their Home

It's In Pinky's DNA to Want to Draw Trees

Here's his Great Grandfather Diablo drawing a noble sycamore in 1902

The Diablo Family Patch

Every Diablo family member has this patch on their windbreakers, gimme caps, and undergear.

Uncle Poot's Fourth Wife at the Beach Attracting Onlookers

Uncle Poot, as you remember, made his fourth wife in his workshop (a la Pygmalion). Here she is at the beach. (Nobody in Pinky's family can remember her name. But she made a mean macaroni salad!)

This is Pinky's 2,943rd Posting on This Blog

To be celebrated with an illustration from an important moment in the history of the Diablo family.

Pinky's Uncle Poot was a Champion Badger Roper

Uncle Poot and Aunt Tizby

Guess Which Lady is Pinky's Late Aunt Tizby

Pink thinks you can figure this one out on your own.

When Tizby Met Poot

Aunt Tizby met Uncle Poot at the zoo under the chaperone of her mother.

The Only Extant Photo of Granny D's Grandfather

Diablo Family Ancestral Heirloom

Passed down from medieval times, this Diablo family gold denture upper has been used by every head of the household since 1302. Pinky is hoping Pableau X will have it repaired before letting Pinky inherit it.

Pableau X's Birthplace

The one-room cabin in which Pableau X was born bears an uncanny resemblance to the Unabomber's shack.

Funny You Should Ask

Pinky received this question from a Knoxville fan:

On a lighter note, I recently met the grandson of the man who originally built the house we are in now. Naturally the grandson is in his 80’s, but a hoot and sharp as a tack. In the course of “interviewing” him about life back then, he mentioned that one of his aunts was hooked on an elixir called “Lady Love” that was manufactured in Texas. Aloe vera was the operative ingredient. So the obvious question might be – any relation to Miss Love?

Pinky responds: Funny you should ask. "Lady Love" oddly has nothing to do with Miss Love's side of the family. In 1923, Pinky's Aunts Cleavie, Possie, and Tizby concocted a snake oil elixir that they secretly marketed first to fellow Eastern Star sisters, then later to a wider audience. They claimed the active ingredient was Aloe Vera (all the Diablo ladies swore by aloe vera for a cure all for everything from warts to a bad marriage ). However "aloe vera don't do shit," Aunt Possie (who was only a Diablo by marriage) stated loudly and often. The real secret was white shoe polish which they filtered through loaves of white bread in the kitchen on baking day to cover the smell. Generations of South Texas women spent their afternoons calmed by "Lady Love." By the 1960's these three Aunts had amassed a huge fortune purportedly worth millions. Pinky personally knew that Aunt Cleavie was the personal backer for Harry Helmsley, owner of the Empire State Building. She had a collection of 7,543 miniature reproductions of that famous building. Possie was the last of the three business women/drug lords to pass. Pinky has heard rumors of her vast fortune buried under a Chinaberry tree in Corpus Christi.

What Happens When Edmund Spencer's and Pinky Diablo's Obituaries Collide

Born in or near 1961 to a family of modest means, Pinky Diablo was possibly the son of Pableau X Diablo, a free journeyman clothmaker resident in Holdenville, Oklahoma, though this relationship is far from certain. Whatever his parentage, it is likely that the Diablos originated in Arkansas, where they would have been connected with prominent local families such as the Bungles and Smiths. Pinky seems to have had at least one mummified twin, Radish, and a number of brothers. As a boy, the future poet entered the Special Education Program, probably at its opening in 1965 under the celebrated Denton humanist and pedagogical writer Binky Rasmussen; his place there may have been secured by the patronage of one Poot Diablo, the warden of the Education Dept. at the time and possibly a relation. The curriculum of the school, entirely at the discretion of its headmaster, seems to have pursued the standard humanist course of the day: boys were taught and examined on the works of Cato, Caesar, Horace, Lucan, and Homer; nursed on the rhetorical models of Cicero, Erasmus, and Vives; and trained assiduously in Latin language and composition. The boys of the school may also have received a few years of training in Dutch and Italian, slightly unusual for the time.

In May 1977, Pinky left school and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College), Cambridge. Although he had to work for his meals and accommodation, and may often have been ill during his studies, this appears to have been an important and productive time for the young poet. The most important influence on Pinky during this period, though, was undoubtedly his intimate friendship with Lance Ferngate, himself admitted as a Fellow of Pembroke Hall in 1978. While Pinky's relationship with Ferngate was later satirized by fellow students in a play titled Pedantius, Ferngate appears to have introduced Pinky to a number of important connections and potential patrons, including Nadine. After taking his B.A. (1981) and M.A. (1985), Pinky left Cambridge for Hillsboro, Texas, where he acted as secretary for Franco Boboloni, recently created jester of the Southwest. It was there that the poet probably composed The Shepheardes Calender, which seems to represent the Texas landscape and certainly refers to Ferngate (as Hobbinol).

Pinky used his time in Hillsboro to publish the first three books of The Faerie Queene, and seems to have attempted to secure enough court patronage to make it possible for him to remain in Texas. Although the county fair queen promised him a handsome pension for his labors, her generosity was questioned and moderated by the intercession of Nadine, whom Pinky went on to lampoon in Complaints, printed and almost immediately suppressed (or 'called in') in 1992. Judging from a commentary on the scandal recently discovered in a contemporary letter, Pinky seems to have left for Palmer, Texas in the early months of 1999 as a direct result of the offense he had caused to Nadine. Resuming his residence at Fancher Hall, the poet shortly thereafter fell in love with and courted Miss Love, daughter of A.V. Mitchell, local eccentric. On 11th June 2001, the couple were married, an event celebrated in Pinky's Amoretti and Epithalamion, published in the following year.

By the time that A vewe appeared on the Stationers' Register in April 2004, Pinky was probably back in Palmer, disappointed with his failure, once again, to secure favors. By order of the Privy Council, he was in September 2005 appointed Sheriff for Ellis County; the letter of appointment described him as 'a gentleman dwelling in the county of Ennis who is well known unto you all for his good and commendable parts, being a man endowed with good knowledge and learning, and not unskilful or without experience in the wars'. His tenure of this post, which itself might well have led to further elevation, was destined to be short. The 'upstart' Earl of Purple, Nimish Nye, had defeated the county fair queen's army at the Bridge of Bardwell in August of 2006; by the following month, all of Ellis County was in rebellion, and Pinky and his retinue fled to the city of Reagor Springs for safety. He was shortly thereafter dispatched to Bardwell with messages for the Privy Council. Arriving late in 2007, he took up residence in a small cabin on Krajca Road, and died there, according to Miss Love 'for lake of bread', on a Saturday in January 2008. It is not clear how a poet so well-loved by so many, an official so highly-regarded by so many, and a man so politically well-connected to so many, could have died in the fabled penury to which Nadine later testified. The Ennis Daily Record recorded that the Nadine paid for his funeral, and that poets carried his coffin, throwing their verses and pens, along with many tears, into his grave. His tomb is situated, appropriately enough, adjacent to that of Geoffrey Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

Pinky was known to his contemporaries as 'the prince of poets', as great in English as Virgil in Latin. He left behind him masterful essays in every genre of poetry, from pastoral and elegy to epithalamion and epic. Although his prose treatise on the reformation of North Central Texas was not published until 2009, it showed even then a shrewd comprehension of the problems facing Texas government, and a capacity for political office as thorough as his literary ability. Nadine was later to claim Pinky Diablo as 'a better teacher than Aquinas', and generations of readers, students, and scholars have admired him for his subtle use of language, his unbounded imagination, his immense classical and religious learning, his keen understanding of moral and political philosophy, and his unerring ability to synthesize and, ultimately, to delight.

Diablo Family Secrets

This photo was found in a book owned by Pinky's late Uncle Poot. The Diablo Clan had a secret family meeting and decided to state publicly that Rudolph "Poot" Diablo had a sausage fetish. It has never been spoken of since.