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Has anybody seen this bumper sticker yet?

I'm going out on a limb here, but I'm assuming this is her cake. She can do whatever she wants with it.

I’m guessing the cake actually belongs to this dear lady. Sent to me by friendly ironist, Pat Allen. Now that I think about it, I may just put that on my To Do List at 100 as well. 

Hell,  if I make it to 100, you better believe I’m going to be celebratin’ that I haven’t killed myself for this act alone.

Big Mike the watch dinosaur of the Museum of the Rockies

Do they still call it that? Bozone? Maybe not as the town shows many signs of gentrification. And moreover, “bozone” is also a sniglet—remember, a word that should be in the dictionary but isn’t. According to these folks it is “the substance surrounding stupid people that prevents bright ideas from penetrating.”

On the way back from Yellowstone Park we stopped in Bozeman to check out the (more…)

Image taken while watching the Billings, Mustangs play baseball.

When I watch the tearfilled ending of Puccini’s masterpiece, Madame Butterfly, I keep hoping that the ending will be different. When I watched the Billings Mustangs this season I kept hoping that the ending would be different, but we all knew in our hearts, at least for the summer of 2009, that is not how life—and death—will work out.

The Mustangs lost 3-0 to the Helena Brewers at this last home game for the 2009 season. I listened to the crowd in different places that night. Only a few were unhappy. Most people knew what the outcome was likely to be. They were accepting, almost serene. But they also knew what had happened on the penultimate evening of the season, just the night before. Amazingly and surprisingly, two walk-off home runs in successive games, something not seen this year at Dehler Park, and probably fairly unusual in most places, had enabled the Mustangs to win a Pioneer League double-header.

So hope is not entirely beaten out of us. And therefore, almost everyone stayed to the end. We all gave our Italian pitcher a warm send off back to his home to play in World Cup games for Italy. He did well. Our batters had failed us miserably all year but we are forgiving fans. We will be back next year.

The team actually had six more games to play before the season ended. 4 in Missoula and 2 in Great Falls. I took in a couple of those. See my notes and pictures here.