We awoke to find a beautiful blanket of snow on the mountains peaks above us, and a drizzly rain outside the Lodge. We met at 8:00 AM and went down to the dining room for a breakfast buffet. Our waiter was Pavel from Czech.
| We discussed several somewhat
related topics for about an hour and a half.
Although they're much more complex now, we think it's easier to learn to use a computer today than it was 10 to 15 years ago. The interfaces are so much more user-friendly and similar, and there are many more learning tools available. The advantages of e-Books over paper books, and the disadvantages of the one Paul owns. Will we ever be able to share with friends a downloaded e-book which you've paid for, as you can with a paper one? How soon will we begin seeing paperback books printed on-demand in the bookstore, eliminating the need for a large inventory? The learning tracks in schools. I proposed the idea of each child choosing in which of the three tracks - gifted, regular, slower - he wants to participate in. This decision would be his alone, with the advice of his parents, but without any approval/disapproval of the school officials. The main responsibility of the school officials is to grade each level by some rigid standards, and not in a relativistic way. We wondered if this is already being implemented. I asked the question: if a school, any school, took two polls, one among the students and one among the faculty, and asked them to name the three best teachers in the school, what would be the correlation of the results? Would their choices be congruent, similar, and very different? We think at least similar, if not congruent. |
The rain prevented us from doing any hiking in Glacier, so we bid farewell to the Lodge and the mother Big Horn Sheep and her lamb in the parking lot and headed down Route 89 towards Browning, the infamous Montana combination of Watts, the Bronx, and Dodge City, the one we were warned about by the proprietor of the motel in Kalispell. We stopped at the Museum of the Plains Indians on the outskirts of town. It's small, but well-done with, among other things, three dioramas of the everyday life of the Plains Indians - you gotta love those dioramas.
In the afternoon we stopped at the Old Trail Museum in Choteau (pronounced Show-Toe) at the intersections of routes 220 and 287. Jean had her picture taken with a stuffed Griz, and there was a replica of a Red River Cart, which was much more prominent in the Colonial and Frontier days than Hollywood would have you believe. At least that's what my reading indicates. This is the town where A. B. Guthrie Jr., a Pulitzer Prize winning author of books like The Big Sky, lived most of his adult life. Carol and I spent time with the woman on duty who moved to Choteau with her daughter when it became too crowded in Missoula. She said the only traffic jam they have in Choteau is when deer block the streets. She drove one of the school bus routes - by law, kids can't be in a bus more than an hour one way.
Back in the car driving through "cow country". I continue to be surprised at how brown everything was, and the landscape could change quickly from country so flat you could literally see four to five miles in any direction, to rolling landscapes, to very rocky, almost uninhabitable terrain, to mountains. It was everything I'd always imaged Montana to be, except I anticipated more green and less brown.
| Paul mentioned the fact that
in two plus days, we hadn't heard a single mention of the term
"Native American".
Paul compared the Indian culture to the Black culture in this regard. The books and movies, as inaccurate as they were, created a romantic myth about the West and its native peoples which survives today. There were conflicts, heroes, and villains in the settling of the West which captured the imagination of a country, and which form the basis of our fondness and fascination for the Frontier. There don't seem to be any events in the Black culture comparable to this, and that's unfortunate. It's always been an idea of mine that the single worst thing we did to the Indians was to create the reservations. From its very inception, did it insure that the Indians' grandchildren would remain segregated from the mainstream of American life? Has there ever been a culture that has succeeded in a new country that's done so without incorporating some of the majority culture into their own? This is a common theme in Thomas Sowell's books, and his answer would be emphatically "no". You can retain segments of your particular culture, but no one has been successful by rejecting all of the new one. Why did we set up the reservations? I had always thought it was a magnanimous gesture, motivated by our collective guilt, but now I'm not so sure. Did we do it to intentionally segregate "them" from "us"? Maybe it's just another of those political decisions that's actually done for some selfish or nefarious reason, but sold to the public as a magnanimous gesture. Wouldn't be the first or the last time. |
We stopped for supper in Helena at a Perkins restaurant. The waitress's mom was also on the Atkins' Diet, so she was very familiar with our desire for substitutions on the menu. As we checked out, Carol ordered two Raspberry Cream muffins to go. The manager forgot to ring them up, so she told us to just take as a gift from her.
We continued on the Interstate where I read a letter from a friend of a friend, describing life in the Pinckneyville Illinois prison. A perfect after-dinner topic, wouldn't you say?
| Paul suggested Carol try "target email" as a new marketing concept to generate new business. There are several sites on the Internet which can supply a list of email addresses of businesses, filtered for a specific area. We discussed gifts, or sale pricing on a single item as a means of attracting attention with this email. |
We changed courses for another discussion.
| I asked everyone what he
thought was the "Crime of the Century". It became
readily apparent that we needed to more precisely define the
question. This term is one used in the media, so we decided to
define a premise as close to our perception of what they mean.
First, we confine ourselves to this country, in the 20th century. Next, we believe the media uses this term to isolate the crime that's most captivated the country's attention, not necessarily the one with the most victims. Some of our candidates were OJ, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, the election of FDR, and the Lindberg kidnapping. No conclusion was reached in this morbid topic. Of course, we were naively driving down a highway in Montana not realizing what disaster would occur in four days. |
We stopped for the night at a TLC Inn on the outskirts of Bozeman. As Paul and I were checking in, there appeared a woman behind us who asked the clerk if they allowed pets in the room. Without hesitating, the girl answered "yes", to which I said, "Don't you even care what kind of a pet it is? What if it's a T-Rex?"
Galburt's and we were given adjoining rooms, but when Paul and Jean opened their door, it hadn't been made up - Paul said it was "trashed", probably by a T-Rex They got another one without any trouble.
We drove to Wal-Mart for peanuts, our car-riding staple of the trip, a quick visit to Dairy Queen, then to bed.
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