Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/author/edkemmick/page/53/)
For most of her life, British-born Anne Kania had what she called a typical aversion to guns—typical among opera-singing, liberal-minded Englishwomen, anyway. She thought that guns were a barbaric throwback and that hunting was only for rednecks. When she first visited Montana to see Bruce Kania, the man she would eventually marry, her views began to change. (more…) Continue Reading →
Nate Murphy, the commercial dinosaur prospector I wrote about extensively during my time at the Gazette, is in the news again. I had never heard of Inverse before, but it appears to be a publication that does a lot of good science reporting, and this story on Murphy is well done. The piece is headlined “Is Nate Murphy Holding a Dinosaur for Ransom?” and deals with Murphy’s latest find, from a ranch north of Roundup. Murphy has been touting it as the largest dinosaur ever found in Montana and definitely a new species. Continue Reading →
Elisa Lorello has been a published author for less than a decade, but her writing career has already been surprisingly varied. She self-published her first book, “Faking It,” and then self-published a sequel, “Ordinary World,” shortly after, in 2009. In the face of slow sales, she released both books on Kindle. Sales were still slow—until she lowered the price on them from $1.99 to 99 cents, and they caught fire. (more…) Continue Reading →
On this Fourth of July, let’s count our blessings by reading a truly funny piece of work from Robert Kirby, a columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. One blessing is freedom of speech, which gave a couple of out-of-staters staying in a Butte hotel the right to display their monumental jackassery, to demonstrate the essence of what it is to be a supporter of Donald Trump. That same freedom allowed our columnist, who “sensed an opportunity to make things worse,” to directly confront the Trumpsters and expose them for the mindless bigots they were. There is also freedom of the press, which allowed the Tribune to publish Kirby’s column. And now we all have the freedom to laugh (this right has more to do with the Declaration of Independence than the Constitution, but hey, it’s the Fourth of July) at Kirby’s brilliance. Continue Reading →
Former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot, also the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, is making waves for his anti-Trump op-ed in the Washington Post. The piece is interesting both for what it says and what it does not say. For starters, it is full of the kind of grandiloquent Hallmarkian sentiments Racicot was known for when he was governor. (more…) Continue Reading →
The Yellowstone Valley Citizens Council is partnering with Art House Cinema & Pub to present a Food Film Festival on three Tuesday evenings this month. The tagline for the festival is “Films about how what we eat matters for people and the planet.” The festival is part of the larger Community Food Campaign sponsored by the Northern Plains Resource Council, of which the YVCC is an affiliate. (more…) Continue Reading →
If you think young adult fiction is something to be looked down upon, or that the people who write young adult fiction are to be condescended to, I invite you to match wits, or sentences, with Blythe Woolston. Woolston is a Billings author, a late-bloomer whose first book, “The Freak Observer,” was published six years ago, when she was 53. She has published three other books since then and she is almost done with another. (more…) Continue Reading →
Potential customers of and investors in a downtown Billings cooperative bookstore got a sneak peek at the space Thursday night. The two-hour open house at This House of Books, in the old Wendy’s at Second Avenue North and North 29th Street, attracted a steady flow of people. The event no doubt got a bit of a boost from the Pita Pit-hosted Alive After 5 concert, which drew hundreds of people to the stretch of Second Avenue between North 29th and Broadway. (more…) Continue Reading →
Before reading Sid Gustafson’s new novel, “Swift Dam,” the only thing I’d seen of his was a short story in the winter 2015-16 edition of The Montana Quarterly. The story was uncommonly good, but I didn’t even recall reading it until I had finished this novel. What really prompted me to pick up “Swift Dam” was my fascination with the Gustafson family. (more…) Continue Reading →
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how cities like Billings seem to be islands of optimism and innovation in a sea of political dysfunction and pessimism. Recently—better late than never—I finally got around to reading a similar argument, made by James Fallows in the March issue of The Atlantic. It was similar only in terms of some of Fallows’ conclusions. His lengthy piece, unlike my column, involved a good number of case studies, actual statistics and lots of good reporting. (more…) Continue Reading →
