YEAH! MONT-CORE!!!! thanks

In reply to this comment by marinara:
*promote this little crappy thing coz i loves it

If this was the Montana State Fair they could add rocky mountain oysters to the list.

10 years ago I was fourteen and was living on a ranch with my mother’s parents. It was the year I learned to snowboard, got my license, and quit smoking (tobacco). As a painfully shy tom boy, I didn’t have friends (besides my older brother and his crew), or a date (brother beat up the nerds I liked ) The next three years of high school were spent in the TINY town of Circle Montana. At 16 I got a best friend who I would spontaneously takes road trips across the state with. It was though her I got my first boyfriend the summer I turned 17. That summer we ran away to West Yellowstone and felt free…

At 17 with family problems on the ranch I moved to Billings (largest city in Montana). I finished my senior year there while staying in an apartment right across the parking lot from school. I worked washing, fueling, and parking UPS trucks to pay the rent. I almost got married at 19, broke up and moved in with my father’s parents. I started school at MSU as an Environmental Science major. After a year I decided I needed change.

Summer of 2005 I moved to Cookeville Tennessee to go to school at the Appalachian Center for Craft. To afford school, I took a year off and worked in the factories. I was an auto airbag inspector, assembler and typesetter…*yawn*. I finally started school again in the fall of 2006 in the glassblowing program. After a semester of glass I changed to metal. I started in Blacksmithing then shifted towards Metalsmithing. I just started working in clay a year ago and picked that up really quickly. Now I just got to finish my senior thesis this spring and get the fuck out of this place.

I have been down and lonely...but things have really changed for the better.

I had a long-lasting crush on a girl, and it actually motivated and inspired me in many ways over the years. Feelings of attachment and righteousness aren't "in place of" clear thinking, they can co-exist.

Religion is a little deeper in us, remember Ted Kaczynski making up his own rabbit-god while he was solo in the Montana forest?

"While I was living in the woods I sort of invented some gods for myself. Not that I believed in these things intellectually, but they were ideas that sort of corresponded with some of the feelings I had. I think the first one I invented was Grandfather Rabbit. You know the snowshoe rabbits were my main source of meat during the winters. I had spent a lot of time learning what they do and following their tracks all around before I could get close enough to shoot them. Sometimes you would track a rabbit around and around and then the tracks disappear. You can't figure out where that rabbit went and lose the trail. I invented a myth for myself, that this was the Grandfather Rabbit, the grandfather who was responsible for the existence of all other rabbits. He was able to disappear, that is why you couldn't catch him and why you would never see him... Every time I shot a snowshoe rabbit, I would always say 'thank you Grandfather Rabbit.'"

It satisfies our need to humanize our environment (and our existence) and have a personal relationship with it. Though I think your metaphor was right on in some ways, I don't think religion can be reduced to that level of triviality.

>> ^Drax:
Obviously this fades over time as one wises up.. but remember getting a massive crush on someone in your youth, and falling in love with very little knowledge of the person? Remember how it felt?
I think this same emotion is felt for many with religion. No I don't mean they have an actual crush on Jesus or anything, it's just that same sort of base feel of love. I mean it's there in all of us, we just wise up to falling into it frivolously over time with physical people. When it's felt for something abstract, there's no rejection to make you realize you're in it's trance, or conversely no one to work with to develop it into a more true love.
I think -that's- a key reason religion is so strong for some people. It's certainly a good emotion, but it causes a feeling of attachment and righteousness (in a, 'I'm on the right path...' sort of way) in place of clear thinking.
Just my theory.

It's not only hippies who build these types of homes. Go through places like the Dakotas and Wyoming and Montana, and you'll find that ranchers and farmers have been building huge straw bale homes for ages.

1. Can dance.
2. Can’t sing.
3. Loves pizza.
4. Hates pasta.
5. Likes the frigid cold.
6. Is missing Montana.
7. Resents Central Tennessee.
8. Has a crush on Canada (Alberta and BC I’m looking at you…)
9. Grew up around boys.
10. Strangers talk to me more often than my family does.
11. Rescues animals.
12. I Have killed animals.
13. I Have killed animals against my will.
14. Doesn’t like pork.
15. Eats turkey bacon.
16. Was almost married at 19 (dodged a bullet).
17. At one point was probably the only person in eastern Montana to have blue hair.
18. Used to play the flute and piccolo.
19. Got my training license at 14 (my real one at 15)
20. Once forgot my own birthday. (My sweet 16)
21. Used to be able to bench my own body weight but now I’m a wimp/heavier.
22. My mother was very artistic (she could draw or sculpt anything from her head). She didn’t do anything productive with her talent. She also has paranoid schizophrenia.
23. My dad worked for the railroad he was bipolar and “went crazy”. Living on the streets until he was ironically mugged, left on the train tracks to die (being ran over by a train).
24. My dad’s father also worked for the railroad…he's my real dad..(not in a biological sense)
25. My redneck neighbors really are that loud.

>> ^phelixian:
The non-lethal part doesn't apply to those that gouged their ears out.


At least it hasn't occurred to them that blasting Hannah Montana would be more effective.

I was going to upvote this for the dummy of a creationist, but the Motorhead at the end is what actually got my vote =)

Also, I wonder if he paid the RTM for the right to those pictures.

If you're ever in Alberta, go to this place. It's amazing, any kid with a dinosaur fascination needs to go to this museum, period! I remember being there when they brought in the worlds largest T-Rex skull from Montana. They have an area that you can look in and see them working on the fossils. That thing was the size of a small car! Er, the mold that it was in, it was massive.

Either way, great museum, terrible speaker. "Let's use science!" Sir, I don't think you would know science if it came up and split a cell right in front of you!

http://www.videosift.com/video/Alpine-Slide-Whitefish-Montana

Are you from Montana or do you guys just like to vacation there?...If you don't mind me asking.

Very lovely setting for a Sift-up/ get-together. It very much looks like Northwestern Montana (Glacier Park/ Waterton) which DFT and I had just visited last month. I nearly froze my arse off when we visited the town of Waterton, Canada in mid-August. Was it cold where you were at that time? I'm sure what is warm to Norwegians is relatively freezing to me... I've become such a wimp! I don't know how I ever lived in a place that had snow. Thanks for showing us your pix!

btw, here is the 10th amendment

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

And yet more random stuff:

"As of August 2009, 37 states have introduced resolutions in support of "state sovereignty" under the 10th Amendment. In seven states the resolutions passed (Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee).
Further, two states (Montana and Tennessee) have passed specific legislation exempting residents from certain federal firearms regulations, while Arizona has a proposed constitutional amendment (to be voted on in 2010) which would nullify a national health care system from operating in the state"

"If I hadn't been involved in this process as long as I have and to the depth as I have, you would already have national health care," he said. (Mike Enzi, GOP Senator from Montana)

This is who we're dealing with.

I don't think "constitutionality" has anything to do with what's happening in the Senate.

The constitution does not mandate most of the Senate rules; the Senate itself does that.

"This is a very good time to be a Democratic lobbyist...it's incredibly exciting to be able to engage with Democrats and really see things happen. It's always a good time to be Heather Podesta."

The Post notes her clients include:

Health-care clients such as insurance giants Cigna and HealthSouth, drugmaker Eli Lilly....

...Eli Lilly has poured more money than any other drugmaker into opposing President Obama's healthcare reform efforts.

The Nation

This is what we're up against.

The flat screen thing is actually pretty clever, with the added bonus of easy access to the wiring in the back.

The Montana State Trooper is hilarious. Issy and I are actually in Montana at the moment, and concur that the police officers are indeed pretty chill.

Hiya NBee! Just wanted to send a Mrow in your direction. I'm in Northwestern Montana right now, so I think I'm a bit closer to you than I normally am. Mid-Northern American Continental Sifters UNITE!