News you can use
News you can use
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Havre Area Chamber of Commerce Director Shelli Sayers is warning the public that counterfeit Chamber gift certificates are being used in the community. The gift certificates are often bought in batches and given out as bonuses or rewards, Sayers said, and it appears that someone, or more likely more than one person, has copied made copies of some of the certificates. The Chamber, she added, is working with Havre Police and local businesses to get the situation resolved and...
A fire Thursday in the Havre Walmart was contained to a small area with no injuries, and the store is open for business this morning, but with some services limited. Havre Fire responded with one engine and one ambulance at 5:39 p.m. Thursday to a report of a fire at the Walmart on the 3500 Block of U.S. Highway 2 West. Fire Chief Nathan Courtnage said when Havre Fire arrived people were being evacuated from the store. The fire, he added, had started in a section of shelving...
With the Great Northern Fair just weeks away, the organizers of the Jr. Rodeo are reminding youth 4-18 years old that the last day for entry is July 14. Organized again by the Hi-Line Rodeo Team, the Havre Jr. Rodeo will be held Wednesday, July 19, at the Great Northern Arena, and new this year is a start time of 3 p.m. With so many events and so many entrants each year, the rodeo generally runs late into the night, but organizers said this year’s start-time, which is t...
In statistics, the term mutually exclusive refers to two or more related things or events that cannot exist or happen simultaneously. Common real-life examples of this state include that war and peace cannot coexist at once; the result of flipping a coin can’t be both heads and tails; and you can’t turn right and left at the same time. But all this does not mean that two opposite, but related, things can’t both be true at the same time — especially when dealing with that lo...
It’s not you, it’s me. And I’m really sorry, but I’m breaking up with you. I have to go away for a while and sort some things out. I don’t plan on this breakup lasting forever, but you should know that my brain is broken, so it’s a possibility. I know, my brain always has been set a hair off center, but I like to think that it’s in an off-beat, weirdly charming sort of way. COVID, though, B-R-O-K-E it. So, yeah, I am seriously going to take time off from writing and publishin...
In honor of 14-year-old Dev Shah of Florida, who won the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday, this week’s column is about official words. Scripps uses the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary as its official word source, but here in the news world we consult The Associated Press Stylebook, first, and the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, second — for spelling and usage of words that the AP stylebook does not cover. Or, as I like to say, only for words that AP...
In April, the Belgian coastal town of De Panne crowned the top seagull screecher in the closing ceremony of its European seagull immitation championship. Reuters reported in an April 23 article that the contest attracted to the stage 50 participants, many dressed in seagull costumes. They were each judged by a professional jury which awarded up to 15 points for the contestant’s ability to mimic a seagull call and up to five points for mimicking their behavior. The contest, w...
Though this is not the year of the goat, one goat’s demands for attention were recently met with an official response that two officers may learn to regret. An Enid, Oklahoma goat in the throes of an existential crisis elicited a 911 call on behalf of its distressed cries for “help” bringing a visit from two Enid officers that is creating international headlines for the would-be rescuers. The headlines about a goat screaming for help sound like clickbait, but when they were...
I love living where we have four seasons, even if only two of the four are really likable — and with all due respect to fall, spring is my favorite time of year. If I continue with the ranking system, summer is third, admittedly a distant third, but not just an also-ran. It’s, like, “Thank you for participating in our event. You gave it your all and were a true inspiration to everyone here. Wear this white ribbon with pride.” Summer has some good days, but mostly it’s ju...
As truisms go, it’s not very catchy, and it’s pretty unsavory, but after last week, I can vouch for its truthfulness: The night isn’t really dark until your horse starts vomiting. Since I’ve already given away the gripping plot twist, I might as well tell you — in case you’re too tenderhearted for the suspense — that everyone survived the equine medical emergency. Myself included. Now with the ending out of the way, we can roll back to beginning when I found one of my horses...
At the point my friend, Kerri, asked me last weekend what I was doing, I was at the tipping point into the realm of too tired to make words happen, so I let my cellphone camera do the talking, snapped a photo and hit send. I’m so modern and tech-savvy. Kerri messaged back: “What am I looking at?” What? Duh. She wanted my tired brain to type words using my overworked and blocky peasant fingers on this cellphone’s teeny tiny screen-typewriter? Sure, my photo wasn’t a professio...
1. “The vent pipe is not regarded as lost until you realize it’s lost” — Mehmet Murat Ildan. The vent ducting had to be installed on the range hood before any other major progress could be made on the house project. Of course, this was both simple and problematic. Welcome to my world. We — mostly my husband, John — had gotten to the point that everything was there, in place, ready to go — except one 10-inch piece of vent pipe. So close, but it was gone. Lost? Mistakenly us...
While I was talking with an avid fisherman in late February, he confessed he was tired of ice fishing and had put all of his ice fishing gear away, even though it meant he may not get to fish for one or even two months, depending on the weather. In a show of solidarity I also made a confession: “I don’t like fishing. At all. As in I. Do. Not. Like. Fishing,” I said to the ex-fishing guide. Fishing is boring, I added for good measure — as one does when lacking the social...
Yes, folks, it’s finally that time of year we’ve all been waiting for — the annual running of the snowmelt. The celebration has, as we all know, experienced several delays this year due to lingering winter weather conditions needed for the snow to actually melt. For the uninitiated to this sport, or if it’s just been so long since you participated in your last one you’ve forgotten what melting snow is, the traditional running of the snowmelt could best be described as one pa...
I was going to move on from the whole drama of my illness, but I have one more thing to say about being sick and then I’ll let it go — my pets deserve a shout out for their cuteness during my time of need. It all started with the cat, Tony-O, who thought my having a fever was about the best thing ever, like having a cushioned furnace tucked into “his” bed, which, as a bonus, had a quilt and a down comforter add under his fuzzy blanket to give it extra cushiness. His life co...
My grandma developed Alzheimer’s in her early 80s, which isn’t a particularly funny way to start a humor column because, of course, the disease is not funny. There were moments we could laugh, of course, because that’s what Burkes do, find humor. Like the time Dad stopped to visit Grandma, his mom, and found her playing cards with another care center resident. He asked them what they were playing and Grandma said, “Gin rummy.” At the same time, her fellow card sharp said, “Pi...
It seems only fitting that a recent push to define and enforce some kind of time zone system on the moon has a link to the word lunacy. The Associate Press reported Feb. 28 the European Space Agency requested that the moon to have its own time zone. In response, a joint international effort, with all the countries participating in the race back to the moon, is being launched to create what one navigation system engineer called “a common lunar reference time.” The current spa...
Really, Canada? Super pigs? What were you thinking? I mean, of all the countries in all the world we might’ve imagined would bring about the end of mankind in some manner, did any of us pick Canada? Russia? Absolutely. China? 100 percent. The U.S.? Be honest. France even? You’ve seen them riot, right? But Canada orchestrating events that will make the world uninhabitable for mankind — using pigs? It all started in the 1990s when the Canadian government and some pig farme...
I sound bonkers, even to myself, when I talk about how this whole kitchen sink project has affected me. I mean, it’s a sink — houses have them in 21st century U.S.A. They do. Except mine didn’t, and it didn’t for 106 days. Give or take a few hours. Sure, there was a reason. The place is under construction and we weren’t meant to be moved in right now but life happens, as it will. And certainly, in the larger scheme of life it’s not the worst thing to happen to either my h...
In a good two week’s worth of miscues and mishaps and daily trips to the plumbing store on our way to a fully functioning kitchen sink, my husband, John, won the Video-worthy Fail Moment of the Project award, which doesn’t exist, but should. We’d been trading off different duties on the project and John tagged in one morning last week to install the shut-off valves on the hot and cold water lines — a task for which he had formulated a plan. I suspect somewhere there exists...
My bar for evaluating news content is pretty old-school: Is it factual, truthful and unbiased? Sometimes, though, I desire more of this than is provided in article, not in the sense that “Oh, that has inspired me to know more on the topic,” but rather wanting to know “What in the heckfire aren’t they telling us, here?” WSAZ News Channel 3 out of Huntington, West Virginia, reported Tuesday that police in Anchorage, Alaska, responded to a call from a concerned citizen in the cit...
Valentine’s Day is one of the oddest holidays of the year. I can remember back in grade school being required to fill out little Valentine’s cards for all my classmates and thinking that this was one of the stupidest, most awkward things I ever had to do. I asked my mom when I was in first grade why I had to give cards to all the kids, including the kids I didn’t know, the ones who were mean and the ones I had no thoughts on at all. Navigating social norms is difficult enoug...
I recently recognized the fact that I’ve been working my way through the five stages of greed. All I can say is that not all of life’s progress is in a positive direction. I’d like to blame my office’s personal benefactor, the cookie lady, who is, after all, a sweet little old cookie pusher. So I do. She has grandma-style old-fashioned manners, which mean she has her own wiliness. It’s like that social media challenge “How do you tell me (something), without actually te...
One of the big stories this week is about how eight U.S. Marines outsmarted a government artificial intelligence system by employing classic stealth tactics usually seen in Saturday morning cartoons and campy comedy movies — the exact type of maneuvers that would never work in real life. Until they do. A page from an advance copy of the book “Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” written by former Pentagon policy analyst and Army veter...
My husband, John, and I come from a long line of peasant stock, hellbent do-it-yourselfers, who don’t put a price on our time but feel all the richer for our experiences, skills earned, pennies saved, materials reused and reimagined, and wheels reinvented. No time is wasted DIYing project until money is wasted on buying something new. But it takes a certain mindset to value the homemade and jerry-rigged over shiny new things. Plus, we have had to tolerate some hurtful l...
