Serving the Platte Valley since 1888
Serving the Platte Valley since 1888
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On June 28, a shooter claimed five lives at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md. after he shot out the front window of the building that housed the newspaper and roamed the newsroom with a shotgun. The shooter, who has since been identified as Jarrod W. Ramos, had a long-running dispute with the paper that began after “a column in 2011 that detailed his harassment of a high school classmate,” was published days after he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge according the...
It is no secret I have lived in a fair amount of places in my life, but I really don't think I have ever lived an area that can have such different weather that is less than 40 miles apart. This includes going from coastal/tropical environments and traveling inland to nearby mountains that are higher than what we have in the Snowy Range. Hanna, Elk Mountain and Medicine Bow in the north of the county often have very different weather than what is in the Valley. This was...
School is out, Memorial Day has passed and summer has arrived in an even numbered year. This signals, among other things, the beginning of the campaign season for elections. The deadline for filing as a candidate in the midterm primary elections was June 1 with those elections being held Aug. 21. Wyoming is one of 14 states that has closed primaries, meaning a person can only vote within their political party in the primaries. Just before the filing deadline, the Saratoga Sun noticed there were very few candidates for local...
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade (the 1960s) and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” — John F. Kennedy The Moon: Just a Phase? In the late 60s, a quarter of the world’s population watched as American astrona...
“Somewhere along the line we started misinterpreting the First Amendment and this idea of the freedom of speech the amendment grants us. We are free to speak as we choose without fear of prosecution or persecution, but we are not free to speak as we choose without consequence.” ~ Roxane Gay *** What a time to be alive. If someone had told me 10 years ago that a federal judge would have to make a ruling on the President’s Twitter and whether or not blocking users was allow...
When writing a column, way too often, I start on a topic and as I put the idea in words, I find myself waylaid by another theme. Then I realize I want to do a column on the new concept. So the other day I was talking about the column I was writing and the person I was in conversation said, “You are becoming a bit of a celebrity.” “Huh?” Truthfully, I get why, in context, the statement was made, but it started that train of thought that produces columns. So goodbye column...
At one time (not that long ago) there were three major television stations (okay, four if you count PBS) and everyone watched something on one of those stations. The next day, workers would “gather around the water cooler” at work and talk about what they had seen the night before. There was a commonality in what we did. I have never worked at a place where people actually gathered around the water cooler, but I have heard this phrase since I was young (yes, that long ago). I...
The novelist and satirist Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, once said, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” The month of May has reached the halfway point and graduation season is upon us once again. During this time of year I often reflect on my own graduation, the life I had planned and the life I have lived instead. I was a part of the class of 2005, one of the last classes to graduate from Saratoga High School before it became Sar...
I thought I had beaten the flu season again this year. Last year I had one day where I had gotten the inklings of being under the weather and I dosed myself with vitamins and rest. It worked and I threw off whatever was knocking at my door. I think, in 15 months, I only missed one day of work due to illness. Many in my office have not been so lucky. The last couple days of April came and I got slam dunked by the flu I had been reading and hearing about. My poor sister got... Full story
You were warned. I mentioned in my last column I would be writing about the origins of toilet paper. It was kind of a goof—but then I thought, “what the hey?” When I looked up information on the subject I found reams of material on this a-commode-ating accessory. A Crappy History Once upon a time mankind cleaned their backsides with whatever was at hand (including their hand). Leaves, shards of pottery, hay, discarded sheep’s wool, grass, snow, tundra moss, corn cobs, husks,...
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. ~ George Bernard Shaw *** “Don’t even try to outwork your mother. You’ll never be able to.” It is the first weekend in April and I am bringing an end to my workday by having a beer, or several beers, with a former Saratoga Sun reporter. One Tom “Ted” Dixon, beer in hand, is advising me to work smarter, not harder. When he says the bit about my mother, I’m pretty sure my jaw dropped. I think I very nearly dro...
My mother has been telling me for several years, as you get older, the weight just doesn’t come off as easy when you were younger. I figured this out without her prophetic words as I noticed my waist expanding and clothes getting tighter in recent years. Each time I went up another size, I would say to myself, “I love wearing baggy clothes and soon enough I would go back down to smaller sizes.” The illusion nobody had noticed my weight gain was shattered over the holid...
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. ~John Muir *** Growing up, it is safe to say that I was a little averse to the outdoors. I was more content to be inside either playing video games or tying up my parents’ phone line browsing the internet. I was not the biggest fan of hunting or fishing and I rarely, if ever, went on a hike. In high school, the only reason I was excited for the Snowy Range to open was because it made it quicker to get to Larami...