Footage of some things that should never be done on or off a golf course (hat tip ES). Some of these are kind of painful to watch (and likely wouldn’t have been attempted without copious amounts of liquid courage being consumed).

It’s been another warm spring around here (Bozeman, MT) and people were again playing golf in March which is kind of unusual. Ski season ends this week and the furnace will surely appreciate some downtime over the next seven months.

This Fiscal Times story is almost two months old, but I just couldn’t delete it from the drafts folder given my borderline OCD that flares up from time to time:

The Useless Penny Wins a Floor Vote of Confidence

How many pennies does it take to tile a bedroom floor?

In the case of one crafty Chicago couple, about 60,000. Their mantra: “They say it takes a village. We say it takes a bottle of wine and some OCD.”

It might be an unusual way to save on home furnishing costs in an extremely tough economy – but overall the project cost the couple, Ryan Lange and Emily Belden, about $1,000. They say they’d been “looking up options [for their bedroom floor] and were thinking about being green” – then decided to go the penny route after Lange, an entrepreneur and self-described design “freak,” suggested they “just tile the floor in pennies,” starting with a long-ignored jar of pennies.

Belden, a freelance copy editor, says she wasn’t sold on the notion at first – but then “came home one day and found a small corner done, so I thought, ‘I guess we’re doing it,’” she recalled.

The painstaking coin work took four months and 128 hours to cover their 234-square-foot plywood floor, say the couple, who created a blog about their project called thepennyfloor.com.

That floor must get pretty cold in the winter (and the dog doesn’t seem too happy about it)…

It’s not clear what this German man is saying or what he was trying to accomplish in this video that recently appeared in this story atop the Yahoo! main page, but he certainly succeeded in making a viral video.

Is is just me, or, as you grow older, is it common to feel these sorts of shocks in your body momentarily when watching them on YouTube or on TV? I never noticed it before turning 50, but, in recent years, whenever I’m taken by surprise by something like this, I somehow feel the subject’s pain for just a split-second. It’s kind of weird, actually.

This story is a little disturbing, though, in the scheme of things, I suppose it’s pretty far down the list of things in the world to be worried about.

Nearly four in 10 U.S. residents say the severity of recent natural disasters such as Superstorm Sandy is evidence the world is coming to an end, as predicted by the Bible, while more than six in 10 blame it on climate change, according to a poll released on Thursday.

The survey by the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with the Religion News Service found political and religious disagreement on what is behind severe weather, which this year has included extreme heat and drought.

Most Catholics (60 percent) and white non-evangelical Protestants (65 percent) say they believe disasters like hurricanes and floods are the result of climate change.

But nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of white evangelical Protestants say they think the storms are evidence of the “end times” as predicted by the Bible.
…
Politics also color perceptions of the weather, the survey found. More than three-quarters of Democrats and six in 10 independents believe that the weather has become more extreme over the last few years, while less than half of Republicans say they have perceived such a shift.

“Their political leanings are even affecting how they experience weather, which is pretty fascinating,” said Cox.

There was some comfort to be found in the scant 2 percent of respondents who believed the world would end this year, as predicted by ancient Mayans.

Culled from the Police Reports page of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle come the best of the Bozeman police reports from the last week along with some items from the Sheriff’s Office. Note that a new book featuring the very best of these police reports is now available from the Chronicle for only $10 – just click on the banner below to find out how to order.

It’s been quite some time since Bozeman police reports have appeared here and, after going back a couple of weeks in the newspaper archives,  I was hoping to find some fun reports of bears during their hyperphagia stage (i.e., when they eat anything and everything prior to hibernation), but, so far, it’s been slim pickins. It’s probably still a bit early as the first sustained blast of cold weather has just begun, so, checking back in a week or two sounds like it would be a good ideas. Nonetheless, here’s what turned up:

• An injured bear was seen limping on Bridger Drive.
• A black bear tipped over a trash can at a Willson Avenue home.
• A cow and bull were on Chief Joseph Middle School grounds at 11:40 a.m.
• An extremely intoxicated man wanted to meet with officers. It was unknown exactly what the problem was, but he mentioned needing a timeout.
• A black bear seen running across Kagy Blvd. was carrying a bag of what looked like trash.
• An officer stopped a man who he saw running on Main Street earlier but was unable to stop at that point. The man said he was racing his roommate home from the bar and now he has lost the race.
• A man who turned in a laptop he found requested that it be returned to him. An officer explained that, while he found it, it is not his property.
• A man reported that a woman “scratched the hell out of his arteries.”
• A man threatened to shoot a married couple and “put them up in a tree like a bear cat.”
• A man was standing over a woman who was face down in a puddle and yelling at her.
• A woman reported that her “stupid husband” exposed himself to a mother and daughter.
• A man asked how he could get a car off his property that had been there since 1996.
• A couch was on fire in front of a Grant Street house.

Wow! The comparison highlighted in the graphic below from this Wall Street Journal story is pretty ominous. It’s a good thing farmers have learned quite a bit about crop rotation and other issues that made the 1930s Dust Bowl as bad as it was, although, if what we’ve seen this summer becomes the norm, then it won’t matter what the farmers do.

Maybe it would be a good idea to heed the advice you hear on the news these days and stock up on meat and stick it in the freezer. After all the livestock that is being sent to slaughter right now (because farmers can’t afford to buy corn to feed them) works its way through the retail chain, meat prices are likely to surge.

I can’t believe how many 90+ degree days we’ve had here in Montana this year – milder summer temperatures were a key reason why we moved here…