You get HD quality by clicking on the Vimeo link in the embedded video.
Dylan celebrates the big 24 from psheehyMSU on Vimeo.
You can watch the whole deal here and it will look OK. But click on “Vimeo” and then on the little icon that has all the arrows pointing out and you get full screen HD. I recorded this with an external webcam and edited in Movie Maker (VISTA version has some improvements).
It gets to the close of a friendly little family birthday party for Dylan and, well, things get just a tad out of hand. But then, you can see for yourself.
Birthday Bizarities from Patrick D. Sheehy on Vimeo.
It’s Dylan’s 24th birthday and things get a little out of hand after the birthday cake has been thoroughly enjoyed. No libations are involved (children are present after all) so no one can make excuses for his or her behavior (actually I don’t think there are any “hers” involved in this segment … other than laughing).
GO FOR A JAUNT SOUTH on 17th Avenue between Durston and Oak and back north on 15th Avenue from Oak to Durston and you will experience THE WALL. A manufactured home park that used to be on the outskirts of town now abuts a tony new development of single and multi-family Rocky Mountain (read that “Colorado) chic condos and single-family homes. An eight-foot high wooden fence separates the old from the new. Two worlds kept apart. More than likely one hopes to vanquish the other all in good time.
The blue line marks the way of the new wall
On the west side of “The Wall” is a teeming community that has been there as long as I can remember. Google Earth shows streets on the east side of the wall but few structures. There are more now, plus two car washes. The new is a work in progress. And it’s actually not a bad development with mixed use and relatively dense concentration.
I don’t know how people on either side of The Wall feel about each other. The newbies are tolerated I expect by the manufactured homes park folk on the west side. The newbies to the east are, I expect, worried about their property values. Neither can do anything about the other. Maybe both are happy The Wall is there. But if it weren’t; what then?
Well worth seeing. On April 8th it came out on YouTube. If you want to see the larger screen version click through to YouTube rather than watching it on Lafondblog.
NEARLY ALL of the north side of this block of downtown Bozeman is affected.
A WARM SATURDAY AFTERNOON and a stroll through a busy downtown Bozeman. One block, just west of Rouse Ave, nearly isn’t there except for some ruins. Downtown Bozeman is back in business but up and down the street are stores with boarded up fronts and signs saying “open for business.” Some of these buildings are more than a block away from the scene above. Click on the photo to see it in full size,
What is worrying is the fate of the building on the far right. See the detail below. It seems intact but clearly there is fire damage inside. See detail below:
BUILDING JUST TO RIGHT of the VFW
The news as seen through the keyhole of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle
I AM AWAITING NEWS ABOUT THE EXPLOSION in downtown Bozeman. I can see the thick column of smoke rising straight up over the empty day care center across the street from my house announcing that something has happened. But I cannot find out what because the newspaper has already been delivered.
I am waiting for news about the explosion in downtown Whitehall. I hear someone say in the hallway outside my office on the Montana State University campus there had been an earthquake at 4:10 a.m. centered somewhere near Whitehall and maybe that is the cause. But I cannot find out how serious the damage has been because there is no story about it in my morning paper.
IN MY FREE MOMENTS I scan the news websites. The Bozeman Chronicle doesn’t update very much and then with scant new bits of information. The Billings Gazette yawns a bit because this is happening to someone else 140 miles away. The Montana Standard, in Butte, seems to update their online site less often than the newspaper itself. Radio? Nope. TV. Nope? Old news. What in God’s name happened to that poor woman who disappeared? Wendy goes to The Academy of Cosmetology on Mendenhall Street for her seven dollar haircut in downtown Bozeman on Saturday and learns a number of things. One of them is that the remains of the still unnamed missing woman have been found across the street from the blaze. This seems most gruesome and I begin scanning my sources, even trying to resurrect a Twitter account I had opened long ago and abandoned because it didn’t make any damned sense to me (being not under 40 years of age). There is nothing. When the newspaper plops on my doorstep Sunday morning I brush the snow off of the plastic bag and pop the paper out of the rubber band (seems a bit extravagant to have a rubber band AND a plastic bag) and the news is … the missing lady is still missing. All resources are focused on finding her. Fire suppression still going on. Continue reading →
Jean gets a closeup from the "Blue" standing area
NOW THAT HE’S GONE, I suppose we can begin reflecting on the eight years during which George W. Bush was our President … of the United States … of America. It really happened, right? All of those images flash by at warp speed. Mission Accomplished. Clearing brush down on the ranch in Crawford, Texas. As I review these things I can’t help but ask myself a very simple question: WHY?
Why did the compassionate conservative immediately get the poor into a vice grip from which they cannot escape until well into the Obama administration? Why did Bush listen to certifiable nut cases such as Paul Wolfowitz and Ron Perlman? Why did people in the Bush administration believe that if you have a football game but tell the referees to stay home, everyone will still play nice because it is in their best interest to do so (see Gordon Gecko and Adam Smith)? Why did our beloved Senator Ted Kennedy allow himself to be bamboozled into co-sponsoring what is now fondly known as “No Child Left a Dime”? Why did Bush do nothing in regard to the Middle East until his final week in office? Why did the American People elect him to a second term after knowing full well what they had got from the first? Continue reading →
Dylan can crack a bubble out of a piece of Dentine
HOW ABOUT A SHORT HOLIDAY LETTER. The tone of things gets set in January when Patrick flys to Bozeman, Montana for the first and last job interview of 2008. Montana State University it is and we begin a really complicated move that involves five or six car trips and now, in the waning days of 2008, a U-Haul truck. Three guys and a truck. Dylan, Malcolm and Patrick. In between these bookends we have a story of transition. Wendy performs her usual miracle and manages to get an offer in response to the first resume she sends out. So now she’s working in this drop-dead-gorgeous setting in Gallatin Gateway (named for the debarcation place for train-traveling Yellowstone tourists). A small school with about 20 employees. She’s doing virtually the same thing as in St. Paul. Continue reading →
IN A GRACIOUS, CLASSY and very heartfelt concession speech last night, John McCain seemed to suggest that his time was over and that Sarah Palin’s had just begun. While it was kind of him to talk up his running mate whose ambitions he knew he had to affirm somehow, I don’t agree with him. I think the opposite is the case.
I have always known that some day the Republican Party as we know it would bring about its own destruction. Implode in a large cloud of dust like the demolition of the giant Montgomery Wards building in Saint Paul. It was only a matter of the right conditions. That awareness dates to 1995 when a moderate Republican friend of mine in Dubuque, Iowa, said to me: “I want my Party back.” What she meant, of course, is that she had been marginalized by extreme, doctrinaire, right wing religious fanatics who had taken full control of the Dubuque County Republican Party apparatus. They became a party of only a few very narrow issues. Of course, fiscal responsibility wasn’t one of them. This phenomenon occurred in Iowa before most other places in the United States. I was starkly aware of it because I was battling the same extremism as a candidate for the local school board. In those days the fanatics imagined they could take control of government by first electing their people to school boards — in Iowa separate elections to which very few people paid attention. Once elected to the school board their people could matriculate upward to higher office — city council, state legislature, Congress and, well, who knows.
Sarah Palin - the future of the Republican Party?
IT WAS A CHILLING notion but one we in Iowa quickly discovered was a largely overblown concern. Yes they could quietly get some of their folks elected by mobilizing church members through “stealth” campaigns. We would wake up one morning and find ourselves represented by people who didn’t believe in public education. People who were home schooling their kids. In Dubuque, where two of seven school board members were of this ilk, they would take the reins of power over a $60 million a year enterprise. In other Iowa cities, Davenport, and I can’t remember where else, the products of this sinister strategy were popping up. Continue reading →
I think it’s pretty good. He reprises all of his themes but does it in a way that certainly hits me where I live.
Check it out.
