News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1435 - 1459 of 3218
Does anybody remember Mighty Mouse? Is Mighty Mouse still alive? Evidently, I thought I’d swoop into my daughter’s life singing, “Here I am to save the day!” Boy, howdy, was I ever wrong! I totally ignored the part where I am in my 70s and my daughter is 50. Once a “Mighty Mom,” always a “Mighty Mom.” I also ignored other basic facts of her life, such a her husband, her teenaged daughter and 42-hundred family pets. Expectations trip me up every time and land me smack on my fac...
I’ve got a good friend, Ayo, who told me, “Don’t use your head to break a coconut.” As I wrote about in my memoir, “Blue Yarn,” I lived in Lagos, Nigeria, for almost four years, and I met Ayo there. Ayo is a very smart woman and a voracious reader and she is full of good advice. Ayo is what they describe in Nigeria as “a serious person.” A serious person in Nigeria is one you can trust, someone who can be relied upon. The advice Ayo generally gives, however, annoys me because it challenges the way I think. “Have you consi...
The entire state of Montana has only one member representing us in the United States House of Representatives. For most of our history we have had two. That changed in 1992 when the 1990 census resulted in Montana’s loss of a Congressional seat in the population-based House of Representatives. Our lone U.S. representative now represents more people than any other member of Congress. With over a million people, Montana’s congressional district is about 50 percent larger than the typical congressional district. Unf...
A principal in West Virginia has been disciplined for plagiarizing the speech he gave to his school’s graduating seniors. Now-graduated student Abby Smith listened to the speech Parkersburg High School Principal Kenny DeMoss gave to her graduating class and thought it sounded familiar. After she found the speech online and saw DeMoss had copied actor Ashton Kutcher’s 2013 Teen Choice Awards speech almost word-for-word, she did what modern teens know to do, she made a vid...
After a whirlwind trip around eastern Montana last week, I’ve settled in a room with no view but, more importantly, with private bath, at my daughter’s new home in Glendive. At times in our lives, circumstances dictate in unpleasant ways. Their last home was a mice-infested hovel with a black-cloud grimace. This home, also an older farmhouse, welcomes one with arms wide-open. It perches on the edge of Glendive with expansive field and yard surrounding it, spacious room for...
Father’s Day is a day to celebrate dads for all they do. It is also a great time for dads to remember the important role they play in influencing the choices their kids make regarding tobacco use. Tobacco use among men remains a serious problem. According to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, one in six men currently smoke, more than 278,000 men die every year from smoking and 216,000 kids have already lost their dad to smoking. Dads who smoke can celebrate Father’s Day by quitting; and all dads — smokers and nonsmokers alik...
Spring came late and so, appropriately, did the annual deep cleaning of the refrigerator. A lot of stuff gets tucked into the refrigerator over the course of the winter. Obsolete condiments band together and take refuge deep in the corners. A thuggish-looking jar of jam wearing a cap of mold sidles up to an empty bottle of horseradish sauce and they both evade detection by skulking behind an oversized bag of sun-dried tomatoes. A stray stalk of celery becomes separated from the pack and is left alone to mummify. Unnoticed...
Scientific studies are great, but they often raise more questions than they answer, even if it’s just: “How much alcohol are we talkin’ here?” ABC4 News station WZTV, reported in April that a study by Penn State and University of Buffalo researchers found that people in jobs that require them to exaggerate positive emotions, or suppress negative ones, drink more alcohol after work than people who aren’t expected to be nice to others. The article gave food service workers,...
Montana and the nation are moving quickly toward marijuana legalization as public opinion rapidly evolves on the issue. A recent University of Montana poll found a majority of Montanans support ending the prohibition on marijuana for adults. That’s not a surprise to me, and seems like common sense. In Montana, support for marijuana legalization, like most other issues, isn’t defined by Republican or Democrat party affiliations. Conversations are taking place around the nation in Congress, state legislatures and city hal...
Bacon and eggs are common base ingredients, but we created a different kind of omelet at Char’s the other morning, a “Friend Omelet,” made of ingredients (ourselves), old friends and new. I had no idea whether we could pull it off. I conjured the germ of an idea shortly after I spontaneously decided to fly to Montana. My little girl needed me. She was born in ’66 — you do the math — but age is meaningless to a mother, and I wanted to see her new home. Dee’s family moved...
My husband, Peter, decided to make friends with a raven. We have a lot of ravens around our house. Ravens are smart birds and Peter did some research on them. They mate for life and can live to be seventeen years old in the wild. They learn to recognize people and will grow less afraid once they know someone. So, Peter decided he was going to leave small treats on the birdbath every day and let some raven couple get to know him. At approximately the same time as Peter hatched his plan, we decided to replace one of our two...
The principles behind installing gates are so simple even I can mess them up. Gates are essential when you have livestock, pets, small children and other animals that you need to keep confined in or out of a fenced area. I have a few miles of fence plus several pens and corrals, which are equipped with different types and sizes of gates — wire gates, wooden swinging gates, wooden sliding gates and metal swinging gates of all sizes and weights. Some of them I built and most o...
Nearly 30 years ago, the first drug court opened its doors with a simple objective: rather than allowing members to cycle through the system and become part of the incarcerated community, DUI, Drug and Specialty courts found a better way to rehabilitate, not to incarcerate. They are in your community and you need to be aware of the good they are doing. Community-based programs provide rehabilitation of participants and their addiction, by allowing offenders to stay out of jail and providing an alternate recovery program to...
Depression by any other name is no rose, let me tell you. Steve and Theresa, my friends from my long-time home in Washington, are back in their home. We had a lovely time together; I especially treasure the stories we told, peeling back layers to reveal more of ourselves. When friends leave me, typically I count on three days depression before I can get myself back in gear. I don’t mean deep-clinical-want-to-rip-my-heart-out-with-a-rusty-machete-and-no-anesthetic type d...
I get anxious, as I might have mentioned. While I don’t think it’s anything requiring medication, fortunately, I became aware at middle-age that I have always had a sort of “hum” of anxiety going on in the background. I usually only notice it when it stops — like when the refrigerator has been running nonstop and you only notice when it falls silent. Anxiety has not always been my enemy. I am almost never late. I never miss a deadline. I lie in bed and obsess about everything I’ve written to everyone so I don’t make a lot of...
Earlier this week, the Wounded Warrior Project offered a great “Statement for the Record” to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. WWP’s analysis focused on five different sections of “Senate Bill 785 — Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act of 2019.” NAMI Montana has been working on this Legislation in honor of our dear friend, colleague and Helena Navy SEAL veteran — Commander John Scott Hannon. The bipartisan bill was introduced by Sens. Jon Tester, D-Mont., and Jerry Moran, R-Kan., to im...
I’ve been a big, fat, liar, liar, pants on fire all week long. I’d be more concerned with this uncharacteristic laps in moral standards, but I’ve been on vacation and I just can’t muster the energy to show the proper amount remorse. This general laziness also explains why all my lies include the phrase “a few minutes.” “I’ll get started on that in a few minutes.” “I’m just going to lay back down for a few minutes.” “I’ll be there in just a few minutes.” “I’m just going t...
Friends come in every size, color and flavor and I would not want it to be any other way. I’ve heard it said that some friends are for a reason. I’d agree with that. Take Benjamin, for example, the man who delivers my twenty liter jugs of drinking water. He is a delightful man. I enjoy our short chats, always like to see him. But we don’t share home visits. My long-gone but always with me friend, David, would say Benjamin is a business associate. And that is true. We have...
The truth is, I don’t actually have 40 friends in my immediate community. I only recently moved to town when I married Peter. So, I just went around town and invited every person I recognized and, somehow, ended up inviting forty people to my patio this past Monday evening to celebrate the release of my book. I invited all the neighbors, and a guy I met on the trail, some writers, and a librarian, and a woman I occasionally see walking her dog—sometimes with her friend, Georgina. The dog-walking woman was recently div...
Friends and neighbors, I attended the rail passenger conference on Saturday in Cut Bank. One takeaway from the meeting that everyone in Northern Montana needs to be aware of; the 2019 Legislature approved House Joint Resolution 34 – the Interim Study on Passenger Transportation. Now, that may not cause any red flags to emerge, except that it was noted at the Cut Bank meeting, as per HJ 34, there is a renewed push to revive the Hiawatha Passenger Service, Chicago, Billings, Missoula and Spokane. Here’s a bit of history: Apr...
We’ve read the reports of how joblessness is down, seen all the help wanted signs and listened to the ’70s generation talk about how “jobs were so scarce back in my day, there was 80 people applying for every job listed, and if you didn’t show up in a suit, carrying a 10-page resume, for a mechanic job you were culled at the door.” Maybe that last one is just my cross to bear, nevertheless, these days, plenty of job opportunities exist, and here are some of them: The Scott...
When Guadalajara rumbled with a 3.9 quake, I neither felt nor heard it but at the same time a weird wind seemingly blowing from all directions hit us hard. That night I lay in bed looking up at the bricks that form my roof. What if . . . I’ll never forget the quake that shook Seattle a few years back and terrified me. It sounded like a freight train headed for my head and the ground rolled. Though a child, I still remember the Yellowstone Quake. Another quake hit this m...
As long-time readers of The Postscript know, I do not delve into politics or current events. You might think this comes from a desire to find common ground with all my readers. You might think I am trying to bridge the divide in a time when there aren’t enough opportunities to examine the myriad of things we have in common. Or you might simply think I am a coward who wishes to avoid controversy. You would all be wrong. I am simply too ill-informed to say anything intelligent about current events, certainly anything that h...
Actions speak louder than words. But words create the environment and world in which we live. Our actions and words matter greatly — and the actions and words of the Montana State Legislature in the 2019 session were clear: Montana will not allow sexual abuse, especially abuse of children, to continue. We removed the statute of limitations allowing for criminal prosecution of sexual abuse against children and established a Sexual Assault Survivors’ Day. Sexual assault, including crimes such as rape and incest, is a cancer in...
While the Catholic Church gets bashed frequently for its outdated church-sanctioned laws and pressured to modernize its ways, I’m here to lend some non-church support for one of those canons which started in the Detroit-area in the 1700s: muskrats on the menu for Lent. Yes, in the 1700s the missionary priests in the Detroit area allowed Catholic parishioners to eat muskrat “on days of abstinence, including Fridays of Lent,” the Archdiocese of Detroit told The Associated Press...
