News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1779 - 1803 of 3210
I always said the quickest way to kill a joke was to explain it, but I think scientists have discovered, unbeknownst to themselves, that the most efficient way to kill a joke is to research it and explain the research. Thoroughly. Apparently, academic study of jokes and laughter is a real thing. Salvatore Attardo and Lucy Pickering at Texas A&M University Commerce wrote a study called “Timing in the performance of jokes” that I would like to share with you in part today. In...
Through with Chew Week is observed in Montana Feb. 19-23. The Bullhook Dental Clinic is partnering with the North Montana Tobacco-Free Coalition to provide free oral cancer screenings to spit tobacco users during this week. Early detection is a key to successful treatment. Health risks of spit tobacco and other forms of smokeless tobacco The Mayo Clinic concludes that while there is evidence that smokeless tobacco may be less dangerous than cigarettes are, long–term use of chewing tobacco and other smokeless tobacco p...
Ai-yi-yi, what a week this has been. A few days ago, tongue in cheek, I mentioned to my friend Dan in Fort Worth that I would be returning to my “quiet and uneventful life.” Dan thought I was serious and took me to task and rightly so. After three weeks with my friends Don and Denise from Oregon, plus another week on the coast, seeing old friends from the years Mazatlan was my home, I am back home, in Etzatlan, in my casita. Jerry and Lola from Idaho, who were here with my...
February must be a month to revisit topics because I’m back with marijuana-infused news, this time home-grown here in the U.S. and as wholesome as a Girl Scout working the annual cookie sales gig. Last week I reported on two Canadian cops who allegedly took marijuana from a drug bust, then proceeded to get very allegedly high — like panicked enough to call for help, but too messed up to explain the problem high and so high the problem turned out to be the other uniformed off...
Last night, Don and Dorothy, former neighbors, made arrangements to meet me to go to Loony Beans in Cerritos for breakfast. I went to the lobby at 8:50. I like to be prompt. I waited until 9:45 before I gave up; figured my wires had gotten crossed. Things had gone bump in the night. I had left my simple, cheap, adequate Mexican cellphone on the bed where I was lounging with a book. I always, always, always put said phone away in my bag in its pocket. Later in the night, when...
Montanans are now seeing the real-life consequences of budget decisions made by the Republican legislators who make up the majority of our state legislature. Over the next year, 28 property assessment offices will be closing their doors in addition to the 19 public assistance offices that have already turned off their lights — impacting thousands of Montanans in rural areas of our state. As many as 14,000 health care providers will have to reduce care for the mentally ill and disabled, some even shuttering their own doors. S...
Toronto newspapers are reporting that two of the city’s police officers have been suspended with pay pending an investigation on allegations that they consumed cannibis edibles while on duty. No charges have been filed and any criminal activities are only alleged at this time. But one officer called for assistance early Sunday morning because he said he thought he was hallucinating and going to pass out, and his partner was found holed up in a tree nearby. This was a few hours...
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke long has long claimed to be a “Roosevelt Republican.” He has said time and again that he will stand with the West and not allow the overreaching arm of Washington, D.C., to hold us within its grasp. But his recent actions have indicated a different approach. In 2015, a diverse group of stakeholders including governors, resource managers, ranchers, farmers, sportsmen and women, business owners, scientists, and energy developers came together as a community to openly and honestly discuss how bes...
This afternoon I waved goodbye to Don and Denise, with hugs and kisses and tears, as they got into the taxi to carry them to the airport. Now I’ll feel an empty place inside me for the next couple days. I’m still in Mazatlan. I was supposed to take the bus back to Etzatlan today. Phone conversations this week went like this: “Sondra, it is Leo. You stay. Is cold and storm every night, just like rainy season. Too cold for you. You stay.” And this from Josue, “If you can, stay...
Much to my surprise, a North 40 column from a few weeks ago created a confused hullabaloo among a few readers who were concerned that President Donald Trump actually might be, as I suggested, authorizing a wall of such grand proportions between the U.S. and Canada that the wall would be able to keep the cold northerly winds of Canada from crossing the border into the U.S. Yes, I was writing about a weather-stopping wall. Let me assure you, dear readers, that this notion is...
After a week on the beach, my guests, Don and Denise, and I, boarded the Primera Plus Autobus in Mazatlan, and climbed across the Sierras to my home in Etzatlan. In a country where not everyone has acquired a car and where some people with cars chose to take advantage of the excellent public transportation, I’ve got to tell you, my friends, we are impressed. We used to have pretty decent public transit in our country, too, until every family “needed” two cars in the garag...
During National School Choice, it is important to recognize and celebrate academic innovation that is happening in public schools across Montana. Our state’s education system is unique. We have over 400 hundred school districts and over 800 schools spread out over our vast geographic area. Many districts across our state are creating new programs outside of the traditional school model that prepare students for the future. Montana only has two formal charter schools, The Bridger Charter Academy in Bozeman and the Lincoln C...
The first news stories of each New Year usually feature people working around the clock to make our communities great. Routine coverage includes the men and women who protect our neighborhoods, maintain our roadways and make it possible to access health care at any time of the day or night. It’s a subtle reminder that Montanans value their way of life and are working together to protect it. Health care workers will continue to advance progress as the state’s largest labor force. They are the doctors and nurses who del...
In the final hours of 2017, when most of us were with our families enjoying the holiday season, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and the Trump administration announced that they were making major changes to the sage-grouse land management plans. Before the New Year’s ball dropped, the Bureau of Land Management released six instructional memorandums to state and field offices outlining how to implement significant changes to state-based sage-grouse management plans. These radical changes, made by Zinke and the BLM, gut s...
The disdain for the American Prairie Reserve’s wooly-minded plan to put free-roaming bison back on the prairie continues to grow amongst rural Montanans who also find it incredible that a nonprofit organization is allowed to pursue its land gobbling agenda with seemingly no objections from state or federal officials. It is fair to say there’s going to be problems when an organization steam rolls into rural Montana communities with claims of a higher calling to displace farming and ranching with a 3-4 million acre nature zoo...
In December 2016, four county central committees and the county commissioners of Liberty, Chouteau, Cascade and Hill counties appointed me to the vacated District 14 Senate seat midway through my predecessor’s four-year term. It was a great honor to be entrusted with this responsibility, and I am thrilled to be announcing that I am running for the seat again after representing you in 2017 and 2018. I have been a life-long resident of Northern Montana, raised on the family homestead in northern Liberty County, educated on t...
The burden of trying to be funny this week is too great for my tense and increasing stooped shoulders to bear. Fortunately, we here at Pamville News are fond of gathering odd news and this week has enough of that to fill the gap. They fought the law Reuters reported Wednesday, Jan. 17, that psychic Sally Ann Johnson was sentenced in Boston to 26 months in prison after she admitted trying to avoid paying taxes on $3.5 million she was paid by an elderly Massachusetts woman...
Greetings from Mazatlan. Every morning I sit on my balcony and watch the waves sloppy kiss the sand. Bird Island sits directly across a narrow stretch of water. Condors, vultures by any other name, circle thermals upward from island nests, then split off in search of wider skies and prey. Shrimp boats troll the horizon. Frigate birds patrol the sky. Pelicans dive face first into the sea, bob up with fish hanging from beaks. Morning sun splatters the beach through coconut palm...
O, Canada, our friendly neighbors to the north, keep your lousy weather to yourself. You and your polite people seem like such greet-you-with-warm-cookies kind of friendly — right up to the point you decide to hammer us with back-to-back, arctic-wind driven storms. What’s up with that arctic weather? Eh? I was game for the first storm. I mean, it is winter. Cold and snow are expected at some point in the season — apparently our ecology relies on it and I’ve come to terms with that. Certainly, we needed something to put a s...
Happy New Year from Montana State University-Northern! One of my resolutions is to re-institute the Chancellor’s Corner in the Havre Daily News. I will be using this space to share newsworthy happenings taking place on our campus with our community, and to thank you for your continued support of our great university. January is always an exciting time at MSU-Northern as we welcome both new and returning students to campus. The break was pretty exciting, too, as we used that time to make some facility improvements, i...
We gringos were all invited to attend a double christening for a great-granddaughter and a great-grandson of Delia, the Rancho owner. In preparation, Jim and I went into town to get gifts the day before the event. We figured since we were specially invited, we should bring gifts. Unfortunately, we went with flawed information. We, separately, understood, or misunderstood as the case would be, the ages of the children to be around 8 and 10 years. We don’t know the children a...
The headline will read “Woman dies shopping for refrigerator.” Readers will be expecting to find that I was crushed by a 22 cubic foot appliance, flattened like Wile E. Coyote, but no, shopping is the silent killer. It’ll be a heart attack that gets me, maybe a stroke or an aneurysm just to shake things up a bit. My last words will be “I hate shopping,” then goodnight, Irene, I’ll drop to the floor in a resounding thud of defeat. It shouldn’t be this hard. I know what I d...
I had to decide. She’d had a reaction to the anesthetic which left symptoms similar to epilepsy. Convulsions. Starvation. A rack of bones loosely held in rags of fur. Put her down. A euphemism by any other name … death. My tears soaked her fur. I held her last breath. My Cat Ballou, playful, teasing, gentle sweet kitten-cat. That night I lay in bed, holding memory, accusations rattling around my brain cage, familiar. Why does everyone, everything I love, leave me? What is wro...
Call me a snowflake, I don’t care, but I refuse to participate in the scam called New Year’s resolutions because it is an affront to my emotional well-being. You know the drill. Along with lists of Top 10 Whatevers of the Year, along with the Best This and the Worst That recaps, we get this pressure to come up with awesome ways we are going become the new and improved version of ourselves — eat right, get more sleep, exercise more, lose weight, get a raise/...
“Sure wish I’d known 40, 50, years ago what I know today. I might have done some things differently,” I told my daughter. I was bemoaning my financial status, not for the first time, more like a recurring toothache or a grumpy relative one feels obliged to visit. “There you go again, bad-mouthing your ‘lack-of-planning’ choices. Most people work their whole lives for retirement and then never end up getting to do anything with it. When you worked, you worked hard. Then when y...
