One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
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It finally happened! I finally convinced my 12-year-old daughter, Sophia, to sit down and watch Star Wars. She has always shown interest in the franchise, but I have never been able to get her to watch what I consider one of the greatest trilogies ever filmed. I'm nerdy in that way. I have never been much of a Sci-Fi fan and I can't stomach Star Trek, but ever since I was a young tyke, I have been a fan of George Lucas' original three movies. Now I know that there are actually six movies total so it is not technically a trilogy, but the last th...
Last week I got on my soapbox and called names...pretty childish. I got a call from a concerned reader that I had muddied the name of the Phillips County News. This reader was offended about the language I used and that I attacked another person. She said that my opinion about Ann Coulter showed my political leanings and my language was middle-school at best. Looking back, I have to agree. I would like to apologize to anyone I offended with last week's column. I tried to make an argument that a person who would disfranchise a group of American...
Sorry for the ambiguous headline. I know that statement leaves you wondering on where I stand on this person. I’ve always suspected that Ann Coulter was of the swine species, but she went ahead and confirmed it as fact this past week…she is the slimiest of slimes. I try to stay away from religion and politics in my weekly blathering and, to be honest, this column isn’t so much about my political beliefs but rather my thoughts on blowhards trying to sell books. Ms. Coulter falls under this heading as last week she was asked if it bothers her t...
Last week I waxed poetic (AKA blabbered like a dunce) about how we would be black and white with last week’s paper but in the coming future the pages of the Phillips County News would be in color, at least for a spell. Well, the future is now. Unfortunately, Stan, our printing ace in Glasgow, traveled to Billings on Monday morning to get prepped for surgery. He said he is feeling fine, but that spot on his oesophagus turned out to be a cancerous tumor. He wasn’t sure if the doctors in Billings were going to operate, start chemotherapy or exa...
Welp, we were late in just about every way last week. The April Fools edition of the Phillips County News got to town late, got to post offices late and for some, got into your hands two or three days late. Sorry about that, couldn’t have been avoided. Our printer in Glasgow, Stan, had a health issue and was laid up in the hospital on the day the PCN was to be printed ... at least he was supposed to be. Stan went into the ER on Saturday morning and doctors in Glasgow discovered that Stan has a spot on his oesophagus. That news made it to us o...
A recent column in the Montana Journalism Review by Allison Franz – Losing Home Advantage, http://mjr.jour.umt.edu/losing-home-advantage/ -- told the story of how the pages of the Great Falls Tribune are laid out by designers in Arizona (that has been the case since 2012) and how in 2015, “at least four of Montana’s seven major newspapers will be paginated by designers thousands of miles of away.” Franz reported that Lee Enterprises (owners of such daily fish wraps as the Montana Standard, Helena Independent Record and Missoulian) will move to...
So, 11-brave high school students from Mrs. Pankratz’s creative writing class made their trip to the offices of the PCN last Friday, and boy, were they ever captivated! (And by “captivated” I mean we didn’t bore them to tears or put them to sleep.) The event started with introductions of the PCN staff and from there we talked about writing a news story lead, the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where and why...and sometimes, who cares?) as well as the always important Ctl+S feature that saves any document one might be working on in any computer...
As I sit in front of my computer this Wednesday morning, removing last week’s news in perpetration for this week’s, I decided to leave the giant picture box on page 1A -- the one which housed the Saco-Whitewater-Hinsdale second place basketball squad -- because I am just that confident that it will be replaced with a picture of the Malta M-ettes hoisting some Class B hardware. No pressure ladies...yeah right. It has been a forgone conclusion that anything short of a State Championship for the M-ettes at the Class B Championship in Great Fal...
What could more exciting to a group of high school aged, young adults than a trip to the local newspaper? Watching water drip from a faucet comes to mind. Listening to Grandpa snore would be an option. What about the rip-roaring good time known as insurance seminars? The list goes on and on, but when Malta High School’s Ashley Pankratz -- who teaches English and Creative Writing -- asked if she could bring a group of students to the offices of the Phillips County News, who was I to say “it will bore them to tears?” On March 20, these stude...
Call me "gullible" or call me "the new guy." Call me "exhausted" or call me "feeble." All four names where applicable last week when I got pranked and ran a photo caption with the wrongs names of two Phillips County residents underneath a picture on the front page. Fool me once, shame on me...and prepare for payback. I attended the VFW/ American Legion Chili Cookoff two weeks ago and met a bunch of new people. I chatted them up, wrote their names down and snapped some pictures. Three of these people where dressed-up in Mexican garb for the...
The amount of things going on in any given week in Phillips County Never ceases to amaze me. I hate to always dump on the former county I lived in, but you would be hard-pressed to find any events to attend in Mineral County. In fact, it in Mineral, it would take an entire year to match the events in one month inside Phillips County. As a “newsman” having so many things going on in a given week it is both a blessing and a curse. There is always something to cover, but with so many things going on, it also means that some events don’t get cover...
The first rule of writing a weekly newspaper column is that you never look back. Last week’s rant was what it was, as was the week’s before. Once I’ve hit 500 words for this column during the week, and I think I’ve made some kind of point without turning 2,000 people irate, I mark it on the scorecard as “par” and move on to the next hole. It’s 14 inches of newsprint that I need to fill on the right hand side of this page each week and sometimes it is a pain. In two weeks, I celebrate the one-year mark as the publisher of this county’s news...
I get, on average, 200 emails per day. No lie. A few minutes ago (Wednesday night) I got 12, count ‘em, 12 , emails from Governor Steve Bullock’s office. I sifted through the first few to see if they had any relevance to our area and not one, count ‘em, 0, had anything to do with Phillips County. No happy birthday card for our county turning 100 this week, no mention of the Malta Post Office hitting the 125-mark, nada. Nothing but jargon and agendas in these 12 emails. I wrote the sender of this onslaught a return email that, briefly, told...
Grandpa Bud always told me that ‘a penny saved is a penny earned.’ He worked the mines in Butte for a lot of his life and from what I know, that was a tough way to earn a buck. His pennies, no doubt, were pinched precisely. The list of idioms about pennies is a lengthy one. ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ ‘I don’t have two pennies to rub together,’ the ‘bad penny’, ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’ and my all-time favorite ‘it costs a pretty penny.’ The list goes on and on, but why do I bring up these little copper dandies today? Let me try...
The announcement of the nominees for the 87th Academy Awards has caused a bit of brouhaha in both cinematic and social circles around the country. The biggest gripe is that neither the director or leading actor in the film Selma were nominated for Oscars this year and it has many people crying “foul.” I wonder how many people who are upset about the lack of racial diversity in this year’s nomination have actually seen the movie Selma? The movie has only been out for a few weeks and though the movie did well at the box office this week – I w...
Last week, the office of the Phillips County News was buzzing and busy. Catching up on lighter work-weeks following the shop’s closure on Christmas and New Year’s left us scrambling and trying to catch up. Things were going along rather smoothly, as smooth as can be expected on Monday anyway, and then things started going sideways in a hurry. It all started with the office fax machine. No I think I have stated my disdain for fax machines in this column a time or two, but I have a hard time remembering so I will say it again...fax machines rot...
The Christmas and New Year’s holidays were a complete whirlwind here at the offices of the Phillips County News. Besides all the advertisements, special inserts and early print deadlines, we found ourselves knee-deep in submissions from the county’s children …i.e. letters to Santa and New Year’s resolutions. A total of 12,000 words were submitted from the area’s schools, each handwritten and one more entertaining than the next. I have heard from a few people that all the letters and resolutions were a bit of overkill. While I admit they were nu...
I have been an Oakland Raiders fan for as long as I have been watching the NFL. Back in the early 70’s, my father was stationed at Mare Island Navel Base in Vallejo, California, a 35-minute drive from the Oakland Coliseum, home of Charlie Finley’s Athletics and Al Davis’ Raiders. My father was around 18-years-old at the time, a fresh-faced sailor from Butte, Montana, making his first stop in a military career that would end up spanning over 30 years. I’m not sure if my father was a Raiders’ fan before moving to Northern Cali, but he quickly b...
As I sauntered into Albertsons this morning –have you seen the beginning of the remodel? Brilliant! – I ran into Dan Perry up near the front check stands. As always, he wished me a good morning and then asked me “what do you know?” As my nostrils defrosted and my hearing returned I instantly heard the lyrics of It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. “I know there are Christmas songs already playing,” I answered Doug’s Question. “Seems like anymore, we just skip right over Thanksgiving and into Christmas,” was his retort. “That’s bec...
If you love snow, you are welcome. If not, please except my most sincere apologies. What? You didn’t know I control the weather? Well, you are correct, I don’t. My wife and daughter, however, do. Thank or scold them for this sudden frozen climate we now find ourselves in. Last Friday, while starting their three-day weekend, my wife and daughter cleaned the front yard of all of our Halloween paraphernalia. See you later, scary spiders. Talk with you later, tombstones. Charity and Sophia did me a solid by cleaning up the Halloween dec...
Last week on Friday morning, I shaved most of the whiskers from my face. I had a decent winter beard going after not shaving for about a month, but when Halloween rolled around, I went down to bare skin as I wanted to be as historically correct as possible with my costume. I had hoped to be Mark Twain for the day and to really set my costume off I ordered a wig, some droopy eyebrows and a wild, walrus mustache. Well, after I shaved, I attached the mustache and eyebrows, plopped the wig atop my dome and took a peak into the mirror. Yikes! Mark...
Each morning that I arrive at the office, I make a pot of coffee to help me navigate my way out of the cobwebs and into productivity. We have a super-fancy Bunn Coffee Maker at the office that makes a mean cup-o-Joe and generally, before anyone else arrives at the office, I’ve got all the liquid consumed. Sometimes Pierre will show up also needing a pick-me-up and he will make another pot that I help him consume. Pierre normally likes to make the coffee a little bit stronger than myself, but then he only drinks a cup and I finish the pot off a...
Watching the sunrise while at the office of the Phillips County News on any given day is wonderful, but Wednesdays are particularly so. Shades of pink, red and orange mix with black, gray and blue until finally the mornings sky comes fully awake and day has arrived. I don’t sit in front of the office and watch the entire display unfurl, but rather catch it in bits and pieces as I venture outside in five minute intervals as I take a break from whatever work I might be doing inside the building. I enjoy my alone time early in the morning at my o...
Sometimes my eyes are bigger than my stomach. Thanksgiving is in my top three of holidays. Any day that features family, football and food is A-OK in my book (throw in a couple of brewskies and away we go.) If there is one thing about this holiday that I could live without, it is the overeating I do on the day. My eyes are often bigger than my stomach and that third helping of whipped spuds and turkey gravy often leaves me writhing in pain as I attempt to pop the top button of my pants. I only bring up the eyes vs. stomach metaphor because it...
Fans of the front page weather spot -- I know there are at least a dozen of you – I must apologize as I’ve made a bit of a fuax pus in the last couple of weeks. I have forgotten to change the commentary in said feature and I’ve called for “warmer weather with a chance of rain” for at least three weeks in a row. Crimeny! I forgot that I had started adding a synopsis to each week’s weather prediction and I haven’t changed it in a bit. It is a nice touch, I think, and I will now remember to change it on a weekly basis. However, If it is still read...
