News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 2500 - 2524 of 3210
How does one really come to know oneself, in a deep and meaningful way … asks the shallowest person in the newspaper industry: me. The answer is that to truly come to know oneself, one must go shopping … says the intellectual-surface-dweller who hates shopping more than dental work, cleaning house and canned spinach — all combined. This newfound wisdom comes from recent forays into the world of pickup truck shopping. Yes, know thy shopping needs, know thyself. The shopping sta...
Halfway back from my morning walk, I reached into my pockets, all four pockets. One at a time, naturally. I’d forgotten my keys. The last thing I do when I leave my apartment is turn the lock in the doorknob. In a flash of memory I could see my keys — in the bottom of my bag — in the house. I felt a combination of desperation plus an urge to throw up. Over-reaction? Certainly. My mind was pre-occupied. A friend is hospitalized and the family is gathering. But still ... still, I felt like a fool, a silly sort of fool (rath...
Sometimes I feel crazy about my animals, really. Tuesday I spent 45 minutes riding my horse with my dog along for the adventure, then spent one-and-a-half hours cleaning mud and weed seeds off my dog. Why? Because, that was the responsible thing to do, and I think my dog looks cuter than a bug's ear with the fuzzy/wiry hair on his legs left longish. Chaps - that's what they call the fuzzy-leg look, and he rocks them like an A-list star - collect everything dirt and weed related, and they need to be cleaned frequently. His cha...
In a note to a friend I mentioned that I have lived my life in chunks. The years on the ranch. Years raising my children. Years re-covering furniture. Years in theater. Years in city government. Those sorts of chunks. Some chunks overlap. Some chunks I have tried to bury far from memory. Others I treasure. All are part of what makes me, well, me. I wonder what will define this particular chunk of my life. Lord knows, it is different from all the others. Looking back, I can find clues to what led me to decisions I made. For...
High on the list of life’s elixirs, those magical potions that bring a spark of, well, magic to food, to gatherings, to life itself, is horseradish. Yes, glorious, creamy, rip your sinuses right out of your head horseradish. What’s a roast beef without it? Just a slab of slightly pinkish, brown meat of beast taking up space on my plate and underwhelming my palate. When you have roast beast cooking away in the oven on a crisp fall-like day and nary a jar of horseradish to be...
Egads! Another hurricane. Last week Hurricane Norberto blew past, waved “hello” and left unwelcome gifts of havoc. This week, Hurricane Odile, not to be left behind, followed the same path. Fortunately, we in Mazatlan experienced only the side effects. When speaking of weather, it is a horrible thing to say we are lucky. When hail strikes the plains, one wheat farmer is wiped out and the neighbor’s fields go unscathed. Weather isn’t “fair.” Our particular neighbor is Cabo San...
I was very pleased with your recent front-page article describing the changes that have taken place at Hays-Lodge Pole School under the supervision of a new school board and a highly qualified new school superintendent, Margaret Campbell. As your article noted, the large grant the school received and innovations made at the school were greeted by a visit from Denise Juneau, the excellently qualified Montana superintendent of public instruction. Particularly, I appreciated the remarks made by Campbell and her description of...
One of the greatest tragedies to an enlightened mankind, which, as a group, develops a strong sense of attachment, is dealing with loss. This can be loss of loved ones or co-workers, loss of a home or familiar landmark, or loss of an heirloom or - worst of all - any of our precious, glorious, bountiful stuff which we accumulate in our lives. It has been a week of loss. Tragedy is stalking my house, and it's rearranging, killing and stealing my things one by one. It started wit...
Dear Richard, Across the street the sewer main sprung a vicious leak. Nasty, smelly water is burbling up, sending a gray putrid pool down the street my way. The break is right on the corner of Calle del Pulpo and Tiberon. Actually, I don't know where the break is but that is where the icky water is gushing out. Please send the guys down to fix it. With all the flooding going on, a side effect of Hurricane Norberto, I don't know when the city crew here can get to it. I would call in the break, but I don't know who to call or...
The Gods of Irony have their own random agenda, and they rarely interact, intervene or interfere on purpose with a human - unless of course, that human has horses, then they're fair game. Horses are magical creatures whose true gift is to be four-legged irony magnets. Want a personal visit from the Ironies? Just say about a horse task: "This will only take a minute." Mayhem is the only possible result. There will be running, snorting, tails flying. There will be a gate...
Drag me kicking and screaming to the latest electronic devices and I obviously want nothing to do with them. My cellphone — the dumbest one I can find — is smarter than I am, and has functions I’ll never use. Writing on paper, any paper, even a brown bag, with a soft lead pencil gives me satisfaction in the depths of my soul. I like the texture, the drag-scritch of the lead across the surface, the drag tracks the pencil leaves in its wake. Having said that, I confess, the only...
There has been a lot of jocularity in recent days because of the national craze of challenging people to have ice cold water poured over their heads as a way of raising funds for the fight against ALS, the dreaded neurological disease. If the craze moves forward this week as it did last week, it seems like nearly everyone in the country will have had the honor of being doused with frigid water. We hope so. It all raises more money and awareness for the cause. But we hope the hilarity of the ice bucket treatment doesn’t detrac...
War doesn’t do as much for humanity as it used to. We’re all so angry and ill-tempered it’s tiresome. Where's the unity? After World War I and its exciting sequel World War II, the war franchise seems to have increasingly fizzled as a means to unify people. Allies aren’t close buddies. All the enemies declare their own victory. People are dead, money is spent and no one gets a sense of satisfaction. Enemies, allies, countrymen, neighbors, everyone is so crabby-...
Actually, there is no “we.” I am the one wondering if I lost my last wing nut. I’m down in the dumps, crawling along the bottom of the pit, rolling in slime and garbage. Well, it sort of feels like that. After a month of visiting friends and relatives, being part of their everyday “normal” life, I cannot help but make comparisons. Of course, I compare my insides (see above) with your outsides. You, of course, come out looking beautiful in my assessment, happy, joyous an...
I attended the Dawson County Fair with my daughter Dee Dee and her family. It was touch and go whether there would even be a Saturday night rodeo. Black clouds had rolled in, covering the sky, temperatures dropped, thunder roared and lightning struck as rain pounded the ground for hours. Too dramatic? Four different storm cells hit in succession and all the above is true. When we got to the fairgrounds the rides had been shut down. Rain aided the Mud-a-palooza, mud volleyball...
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, or what we call just another day here in Pamville. What I intend to do when the Internet goes down: read a book, get ahead on writing assignments. What I get done: watch a DVD, doodle in my notepad, eat. What I intend to do when the power goes out: read, do outside chores, go for a long hike. What I do: sleep, call someone in town to ask if their power is on, drive to town for an ice cream cone. What I intend to do with my long...
We’ve all met those people, those cool people who are so super cool that they don’t even know that they’re cool or that you are a changed person just by having met them. Should you ever have the opportunity, or whatever, to meet me, you will soon start wondering where you could go to find such a person. Kind of like a cleansing of the mind’s palate after encountering something distasteful. I don’t really have much personal experience with being cool — regular cool, super...
Hi, my name is Alexandria. Call me Lexi. Grandma took me on train from Seattle to Wolf Point so I can spend time with my cousin Antoinette. Call her Toni. I am 6 years old. Toni is 8. Grandma asked me to write about the trip. So I took notes. We left Seattle from the newly restored King Street Station. Grandma told me to write that. It is beautiful. I told Grandma this is my story, and she should write her own story. In fact, I had to teach Grandma to give up all thoughts and...
I met my wife for the first time in Creative Leisure. I had gone to Creative Leisure to rent a movie that had just come out - it may have been "Shaun of the Dead," or "Kill Bill," or some other cult classic from the early 2000s - and I had just rented the last copy in stock. This cute girl and a couple of her friends came in and asked Rick Linie if he had any copies left of the very movie in my hands. An awkward kid barely out of his teens, I said something stupid like "Nyah...
Sen. John Walsh, D-Montana, has been caught red-handed plagiarizing a report for his master’s degree. The New York Times did a tremendous public service by discovering and reporting on the plagiarism at the Army War College. Since then, many voters are taking a second look at the former general and his candidacy. The war college is taking a second look at the degree he received. The senator and his staff have given various accounts of the whole mess in recent days. But one gets the sense that there is something of a shrug of...
I met my wife for the first time in Creative Leisure. I had gone to Creative Leisure to rent a move that had just come out - it may have been "Shaun of the Dead," or "Kill Bill," or some other cult classic from the early 2000s - and I had just rented the last copy in stock. This cute girl and a couple of her friends came in and asked Rick Linie if he had any copies left of the very movie in my hands. An awkward kid barely out of his teens, I said something stupid like "Nyah...
I met my wife for the first time in Creative Leisure. I had gone to Creative Leisure to rent a move that had just come out — it may have been “Shaun of the Dead,” or “Kill Bill,” or some other cult classic from the early 2000s — and I had just rented the last copy in stock. This cute girl and a couple of her friends came in and asked Rick Linie if he had any copies left of the very movie in my hands. An awkward kid barely out of his teens, I said something stupid like “Nyah nyah, I’ve got the last one,” rather than being...
Sen. John Walsh, D-Montana, has been caught red-handed plagiarizing a report for his master’s degree. The New York Times did a tremendous public service by discovering and reporting on the plagiarism at the Army War College. Since then, many voters are taking a second look at the former general and his candidacy. The war college is taking a second look at the degree he received. The senator and his staff have given various accounts of the whole mess in recent days. But one gets the sense that there is something of a shrug of...
Nothing says Americana quite like the Midwestern heartland and good ol’ American ketchup, and nothing says America’s heartland needs you more now than ever than a 170-foot-tall ketchup bottle going on the auction block in a little city called Collinsville, Illinois. This isn't just any old 170-foot ketchup bottle. It is a vintage, mint condition, red-white-and-blue, world’s giantest ketchup-bottle-disguised 100,000 gallon water tower, ever. Ever, I tell you. But that...
I’m freezing. I’ve been shivering since landing at Sky Harbor in Phoenix last Wednesday. Phoenix is even hotter than Mazatlan. This being summertime, I didn’t expect frigid air in Phoenix. I had forgotten the airport is a converted refrigeration unit. Figuring I would not need them until I reached my destination in the middle of the night in Seattle, I had packed my sweater and jeans jacket in my checked luggage, somewhere in the bowels of an aircraft. Within half an hour...
