Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/prairie-lights/page/16/)
I see where a young feller who works for the newspaper in Helena has written a piece headlined “10 things out-of-towners quickly learn after moving to Montana.”
It seems this young feller, Landon Hemsley, moved here in January from San Diego, which makes him more of an out-of-stater than an out-of-towner, but we’ll blame an editor, not Landon, for the headline. (more…) Continue Reading →
If you’re reading this and it’s warm and sunny outside, you might want to stop right here and continue later. That’s because I want to tell you about a collection of one-minute films that attempt to capture various aspects of Montana, and you’re liable to think, as I did, “What’s the harm in watching a few one-minute films?” (more…) Continue Reading →
There’s lots of news about the news in Montana, though some of it is rather old by now. The most surprising news, to me, is that the Montana Standard in Butte has hired David McCumber as its new editor. The Standard, where I landed my first newspaper job 35 years ago, has had a lot of editors in its long history, but for decades most of its editors have come from within Lee Enterprises, the Iowa-based chain that owns the Standard (and the Billings Gazette). (more…) Continue Reading →
Reading recent editions of the Billings Gazette—known fondly by some as the Billings Police Blotter—has been an eye-opening and thought-provoking experience. Amid the usual catalog of serial drunk drivers, oil-patch meth runners, girlfriend-assaulting miscreants and keno-addicted embezzlers, there were a few crimes of genuine weirdness, riveting in their strangeness and even, in a couple of cases, their moral ambiguity. (more…) Continue Reading →
TROY—On the first day of spring, and just four days after St. Patrick’s Day, I found myself in what had to be the greenest spot in all of Montana. I was at the Ross Creek Cedars, a 100-acre grove of western red cedars that reach for the sky a little south of Troy off Highway 56. Some of these monster trees are said to be nearly 1,000 years old and to rise to a height of 200 feet. (more…) Continue Reading →
There is some hope coming out of Helena. On Friday, a state House committee killed a bill that would have provided continuing cover for some of the worst banking fraud in American history. (more…) Continue Reading →
If you want to get some sense of what Billings was like in the old days, you can’t do much better than walk through the North Side, that triangle of land bordered by the BBWA Canal, North 27th Street and Sixth Avenue North. Officially, the North Park Neighborhood as designated by the city of Billings extends south all the way to Montana Avenue. But for me, the neighborhood’s cohesiveness can’t survive the jump across Sixth Avenue, a busy four-lane, one-way street that marks the southern boundary as obviously as the canal does to the north. (more…) Continue Reading →
State Sen. Fred Thomas, R-Stevensville, said he got the idea for his bill to put new restrictions on food stamps from talking to store clerks. He said cashiers told him people were using food stamps for soda pop, frozen pizza and energy drinks, among other items he deemed innutritious. (more…) Continue Reading →
Excuse me for being late on this, but I just discovered (on Facebook, the unsleeping recycler of pop culture) that the Great Falls Tribune published a Big Sky bucket list in December. The Tribune presented “100 activities every Montanan should have on a bucket list of things to do in a lifetime.” I found it impossible not to read the article from start to finish, and impossible not to keep a running tally of how many of the activities I had already done. (more…) Continue Reading →
Auxilliary editor’s note: Important clarifications have been made to the editor’s note at the bottom of this column. Poor David Moore. For the past four or five sessions of the Montana Legislature, at least one lawmaker—invariably a Republican, I feel compelled to point out—has made himself a national laughingstock. Moore, a state House member from Missoula, was catapulted to infamy after he introduced a bill that contained, even in its short summary version, the phrase “private parts.” That is never a good sign, and some of the language included in the full text of the bill made things even worse. (more…) Continue Reading →
