News you can use
News you can use
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I suppose you’ve all heard about the latest horror disease, monkey pox? Evidently, this near cousin to small pox is transmitted by bodily contact. I want you to know I’ve sworn off sex with monkeys. Not that monkeys are an issue in my life. Nor is the other. I’d no more than digested that bit of breaking news when my friend Kathy informed me Canada is proposing to print a health warning on every individual cigarette. Yep, my reaction too. My mind boggles. Beyond a healthy gigg...
I’ve been under some stress lately. I’ve written a novel, and now I have to wait to find someone who thinks it’s worth publishing. (I happen to think it is, for the record.) So, while I wait, I get more and more nervous. I know all the standard advice for this, and I try to follow it. I try to get plenty of sleep. (But how am I supposed to sleep when I don’t know what will happen tomorrow?!) I try to eat healthy foods at healthy times. (But how am I supposed to avoid snackin...
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes — CSKT — held their Bison Range Restoration Celebration May 20-22, 2022, which was a monumental day that represented the righting of a terrible time in our U.S. history by restoring and honoring a broken treaty and returning the land and bison back to the CSKT. This monumental day was a day of healing, but it also represented the continued need for healing with all of our Montana tribes and the need to restore and honor many of the broken promises once made. And even though this spe...
Welcome to the latest edition of “Wait … what?” the feature in which we here at Pamville News highlight all the “News to Confuse” — the everyday stories that make us cock our heads to the side and say that catchy phrase, “Wait … what?” For this edition we’re jumping right into the deep end with a May 13 story out of the United Kingdom published online at CNBC.com — and, if I’m honest here, I don’t know why this news wasn’t splashed all over mainstream media. A British...
I want to address Ordinance No. 925 where the ordinance states that “snowmobiles, boats, or other recreational vehicles and campers, camper trailers, or motor homes must be parked in a rear yard unless the rear yard is inaccessible … .” The ordinance also goes on to limit how close it can be to buildings on your own property, among other restrictions. I’m all for getting our streets cleaned up and enforcing parking rules, keeping in mind the needs of contractors who require trailers at a job site of course (which we can do...
Rainy season has arrived early. Hooray! Hooray! Evening rains revive this parched mountain valley. Trees tilt their sombreros when I walk by. When one hasn’t seen rain in nine months, the typical gestation period one might think, each raindrop is a birthing. A renewal. New life. Figuratively and literally. And I laid claim to my Baby Rain, took credit for bringing it about all by myself. I’m human, OK? It may sound silly but it is the way I felt, wet, standing out in the rai...
I have been trying, for as long as I can remember and with limited success, to learn Spanish. My husband, Peter, says I am good, but that is because he does not speak Spanish, so if I say anything that is understood by anyone, he regards it as a minor miracle. I feel that I have been stuck at about the same level of Spanish for at least 20 years. I can ask where things are and communicate in emergencies and exchange the usual greetings, then I dry up. I’d like to change that....
A person’s life has its defining moments, some large and understandably life-changing like an illness or a loss or a great kindness from another person, but others are small, intimate, personal moments that can completely change a person’s mindset and the trajectory of their life, like kneeling down and being unable to get up again without groaning and the use of a prop. One of my favorite activities in the whole world is sitting. Have a seat, take a seat, pull up a chair and...
Not many of us will remember, well, because not many of us were around, in 1938 in New Jersey when Orson Welles adapted the H. G. Wells classic, “The War of the Worlds” for a special Halloween radio broadcast over the “Mercury Theatre on the Air.” Since the story of Martians invading earth seemed too silly and too improbable, more suitable for comic books, Welles asked his writers to gussy it up a bit, give it some bells and whistles. What they came up with was a minute-...
Editor, Last week, Sen. Jon Tester announced he was able to help patients save costs by working with the Biden administration to close a loophole allowing Pharmacy Benefit Managers to charge excessive fees. Sen. Tester noted, “Pharmacy Benefit Managers have been preying on our pharmacies and Medicare patients for years,” and he is absolutely right. These middlemen are often the reason so many have such high out-of-pocket costs at the pharmacy counter when picking up prescriptions. In today’s economy, Sen. Tester is worki...
There have been 27 school shootings in America so far this year. In 2020 there were 612 shootings involving three or more people. In 2020 America experienced 45,222-gun deaths. The U.S. averages more than 20 shootings involving 10 or more people (mass shootings) a year. The victims are white, Black, Asian, Latino, Christian, Jew, Muslim, men, women and children. Who are these people? They are all of America, they are us. There are varying polls, but by any measure more than 75% of Americans, including a large majority of gun...
I think the difference between a politician and a statesman is that the people believe a statesman will do what he or she believes is the right thing regardless of the political consequences. When it gets down to it, a statesman would rather be right than reelected. It is generally accepted that Mike Mansfield was Montana’s greatest statesman. In my younger years I had two wonderful opportunities to have extended conversations with Mansfield. He was “as common as an old shoe” as the saying goes. When he passed in 2001, natio...
Montana’s benchmark wildlife conservation program, Habitat Montana, is back in the news again after voters and the Legislature made historic investments in conservation spending in 2020 and 2021. That program, available to landowners since 1987, has conserved some of Montana’s finest wildlife habitat along the Rocky Mountain Front, The Madison Valley, on the Hi-Line and down in the Big Hole. The program helps family farmers and ranchers protect their home places, while still ensuring that the next generation has the chance to...
“4 New Body Parts Discovered in the Last 10 Years,” it’s the kind of headline you’d expect to read connected to an ongoing serial killer case or maybe it’s an episode name on “Criminal Minds” — but, no, that right there is science. What that SciShow YouTube video headline means is that doctors, scientists, researchers, they’re all still discovering new parts in the human body, our human bodies. Like humans don’t have an identity crisis already. A couple weeks ago I learned...
It is several weeks since the Department of Homeland Security’s admonishment, “If You See Something, Say Something” reached me on Facebook. I don’t remember the accompanying video, I probably didn’t watch it. I do remember the numerous outraged comments about government asking us to spy on each other. The outrage cheered me up: maybe the neighbors aren’t totally paranoid. Then came Homeland Security’s Disinformation Board scheme. The Disinformation Board idea sparked the s...
For the last 100 years the Montana Taxpayers Association has served as Montana’s most trusted resource for nonpartisan tax and government spending information. One of the promises of our mission is to encourage equitable solutions, in issues of taxation, that benefit all Montana taxpayers. As the executive director of MONTAX, I feel it is important to state that our organization believes that CI-121 — a constitutional initiative masquerading as a “cap on property taxes” — does NOT fit that mission. In fact, CI-121 would cre...
I’ve been called ditzy more than once over the years. I’m going to share something I ordinarily would keep to myself because it rather proves the point. Maybe I really am ditzy. I don’t mind. If a thought lazes through my mind several times over a few days, weaving its way into consciousness, I’ve finally learned to pay attention. I’ve been sensing that a retreat would be good. I’d been feeling a little out of balance, especially since my knee was body-slammed near a mont...
Verne knows me too well. For the first time in our lives, my husband, Peter, and I live in a building with a front desk. It’s nice to have someone there when packages are delivered, or contractors show up, and this person is usually Verne. Verne is a natural for the job. He knows everything going on in town. He knows when music is playing in the park and where the food trucks are parked and what time deliveries are made. But what interests Verne most is what goes on inside the...
This past week, I was honored to help bring together educators, the Montana Board of Regents, legislators and agricultural industry leaders for the first Montana Education and Agriculture Showcase. The event couldn’t have happened without planning and assistance from Montana State University-Northern Chancellor Greg Kegel, Sen. Mike Lang, Sen. Shannon O’Brien, Pad McCracken and the great work of Jodi Kueffler, executive secretary for the chancellor. All said and done, 128 people were able to eat a delicious meal entirely sou...
A tic is a frequent unconscious quirk of behavior, and a tick is a hard-to-kill, blood-sucking, parasitic arachnid that causes you to unconsciously and repeatedly scratch your head and body. Tic and tick sound exactly alike. Coincidence? I think not. I wasn’t going to write about ticks. I swear. I’m pretty sure I wrote a column about them last year. I had this whole thing about body part discoveries planned out for today. Brand new body parts. Imagine that. Then the ticks star...
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., recently quipped that it is amazing the Congressional approval rating ever rises to the height of 19 percent. It is not good when only 19 percent of American voters trust Congress to do what needs doing. When people lose faith in government, they are likely to turn to some demagogue who promises to fix everything those weaklings in government are messing up. Unfortunately, authoritarian leaders (aka demagogues) have a history of making things even...
My world is all I have to share. My world is ordinary. It is not much of a gift. Since it is all I have to give, I gladly welcome you through my doorway. Take today. I got up on the “wrong side of bed” so to speak. Instead of getting up when I woke up, I let myself go back to sleep “for just a few minutes.” It’s not like I have a schedule. When I did get out of bed, much later, I felt like I was living in a vat of molasses in January, every movement forced through a fugue sta...
It’s standard strategy in Republican primaries. Every GOP candidate suddenly sounds like a cross between Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman. They all embrace classic Republican philosophies, which in the economic realm, include a strong belief in private initiative and competitive free enterprise as the best means of providing consumers with the most stuff at the least cost. But then something very strange happens on the way to our monthly power bills. Many of these “competitive, free market Republicans” take a detour down...
It’s that time of year again. No, I am not talking about bikini season. I’m talking about bunion season. I did not even know I had a bunion until fairly recently and now, every time I start wearing sandals again, I am reminded that I do. I imagine it was growing on the sly for years before my husband, Peter, brought it to my attention. “You have a bunion,” he said. “I do not!” I immediately answered — because I had no idea what it was. “Yes, you do. Right there, on your foot....
Here’s the thing about Vladamir Putin, he’s a fun-suck, a joy-killer, a joke-hole, the place warmhearted laughter has labeled on its maps as “Here there be dragons,” and like all narcissists, he especially does not like to be on the laughed-at side of a funny situation, so it’s highly unlikely that he’ll be amused that a German wildlife park renamed its Russian wild boar from Putin, in the Russian leader’s honor, to Eberhofer, because almost anything is better than Putin at th...
