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.
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?
Continue reading “Questions for which there will be no answers” »
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 “Christmas 2008” »
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 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.
FROM OUR ONE-BEDROOM APARTMENT we peer northwest at a sun moving daily southward. Under a rising invisible new moon the lights of Belgrade (Montana) twinkle like Atlantic City seen from the northern end of the Ocean City boardwalk. Layers of cold air settle in from the mountains, no longer held back by the day. The sky goes from blue to orange and green to jet black. Our windows are open and the chill air infiltrates our living room. I feel it flowing over my left elbow but it is deflected somewhat by what is left of this warm late September day.
JUNIOR COLLEGE STUDENTS live a half life. Accelerating into two years the matriculation that takes four for bachelors candidates. Maybe that goes for experiencing life as well. Pack a lot in because in May 1971 it’s all over – that is if graduation is held amidst calls for strike, strike, strike.
Being broadcast journalism students we feel this obligation to move beyond keeping students informed about the length of the line at the Food Circus. We have available to us what looks like a radio studio for a small radio station. One that is seriously overstaffed. On the evening of the so-called Harvard Riots, the room with a single ancient teletype machine, nearly a dozen beat-up manual typewriters and a bunch of scratched up wooden desks that might have been props in a production of The Front Page, the regulars are there in force. Holding their breaths each time the phone rings and it is one of our two reporters on the scene in Harvard Square.
The Harvard Square riot follows a peaceful "Moratorium," Oct. 24, 1969
IT IS NOT OFTEN I get to have my family accompany me on business travels so it is a rare treat to have the gang along on two trips around the Great State of Montana.
It’s not hard to put on the miles. The Great Circle Trip as I’m calling it adds up to about 970 miles between business and non-business activity. And that keeps us in the western third of the state! We also take a short trip to Helena included in this slideshow.
BOZEMAN, MONT. — It is Dylan’s great aspiration to see “the M” up close and personal I suppose “because it’s there.” We take off on a beautiful day, just a tad warm but not too bad. And we do manage to experience a bit of nature. Ergo the video that follows.
Just click on the arrow and it’ll start up. If you have a “Type A” personality, this will not be a good experience for you.
WE DECIDE FOR WHATEVER REASON that we wish to aid in the propagation of the species. Then with ease or following great trials and tribulations we are with child. That happy day arrives – probably at 2:30 AM – and we become parents. And on that day when the first of our brood makes her debut our lives are changed. Eventually we don’t remember the nature and form of our existence BC (before children). We adapt, not easily. The shock wears off. It becomes clear to us there is no return policy.
