Mark Twain

Recent Posts

Prairie Lights: No more room for once-innocent traditions

By: |
Surf

I won’t come right out and blame the current occupant of the White House, but a phenomenon already indelibly associated with his presidency has caused me to make an important decision about the future of Last Best News. At least temporarily, and perhaps forever, we will not be running any more fake news. I say this with a heavy heart because April Fool’s Day is just six weeks away, and photographer John Warner and I had already been talking about ideas for this year’s spoof. (more…) Continue Reading →

Filed under: Prairie Lights, Fake news, H.L. Mencken, Mark Henckel, Mark Twain, Roger Clawson

Keillor, our age’s Twain, stops in Billings on goodbye tour

By: |
Garrison

Not too long after I reviewed a performance of “A Prairie Home Companion” in Billings in 1996, a friend suggested that Garrison Keillor was our generation’s Mark Twain. The thought has disrupted my listening to the radio show on odd occasions over the years, and it came rushing back when Keillor took the stage at the Alberta Bair Theater on Wednesday night. (more…) Continue Reading →

Filed under: Culture, A Prairie Home Companion, Alberta Bair Theater, Garrison Keillor, Mark Twain

Prairie Lights: Clawson’s big heart, brilliant pen live on

By: |
Clawson

When the Billings Gazette hired me as a night editor in 1989, I was thrilled at the prospect of working alongside Roger Clawson. I had known of him since the mid-1970s, when I first started visiting Billings in the company of the Missoula Flying Mules, a gang of bar hounds masquerading as a hockey team. (more…) Continue Reading →

Filed under: Prairie Lights, Billings Gazette, Billings Outpost, David Crisp, Mark Twain, Mike Royko, Missoula Flying Mules, Roger Clawson

David Crisp: Mortification, then sweet vindication

By: |
Twain

Well, I screwed that up. Such was the eloquent sentence that I imagined last week might begin this column. I had just written a piece on the closing of Lee Enterprises’ Capitol bureau, and in it I had made what I thought was the original observation that none of the Lee papers in Montana had reported the closing. (more…) Continue Reading →

Filed under: From the Outpost, Chuck johnson, Lee Enterprises, Mark Twain, Mike Dennison

Give me that old-time religion, please

By: |
First Baptist

First Baptist Church, 218 N. 35th St. Service, 9 a.m., Sunday, Feb. 16, 2014
Length of service: 1 hour, 5 minutes. Length of sermon: 31 minutes. A few minutes into his sermon, Pastor Ross Lieuallen apologized for an equipment malfunction that was preventing him from displaying the next point of his homily on the two big-screen TVs in the front of the sanctuary. Continue Reading →

Filed under: At Your Service, First Baptist Church, Johnny Cash, Mark Twain, Milton Berle, Payton Manning, Ross Lieuallen

From the Outpost: How to save the Thanksgiving holiday

By: |

Four years before his death in 1910, Mark Twain wrote his estimate of Thanksgiving Day. The passage didn’t appear in print until 2010 because Twain stipulated that his autobiography not be published until 100 years after his death. As usual, Twain was a century ahead of his time:

“Thanksgiving Day … originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. (more…) Continue Reading →

Filed under: Montana, Mark Twain, Texas Aggies, Texas Longhorns, Thanksgiving