Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
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The time has come for me to bid you all adieu. I'm leaving Sidney to take a job in Bristol, Conn., with ESPN as a program assistant with the radio department. Before a couple of weeks ago, I had full intentions on staying in Sidney for a year or two. But then I received a call from an 860 area code. For as long as I can remember, I've loved sports and loved watching ESPN. My mom was very protective of her son. The scope of mediated text I could consume was very very narrow. I couldn't listen to...
The two Communist holdouts from the Cold War dominate the news again: Cuba on one page, and North Korea on the other. First, President Barak Obama wants to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba after five and a half decades of Communist rule. Then, the FBI has traced “one of the most punishing cyber-attacks on a major American corporation in recent memory” back to the Guardians of Peace, all because of a new movie that mocks Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator. Both Cuba and North Korea...
Della sold her hair to buy “a platinum watch fob” for Jim, her husband, and he sold his watch to buy “tortoise shell combs” for Della’s hair. On Christmas Day they opened their presents, and neither he nor she could enjoy his or her gift. Without her long hair, she no longer needed the combs, and without his watch, he no longer needed a watch fob. That is the plot that the American author O. Henry reveals in his splendid short story, The Gift of the Magi. “The Grinch hated Christmas....
On Nov. 23, a week ago last Sunday, another Soyuz rocket launched three astronauts into outer space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and after a six-hour flight they docked at the International Space Station 268 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The three included the Russian cosmonaut Anton Schkaplerov, the European Space Agency astronaut from Italy Samantha Cristoforetti, and NASA’s Terry Virts. They joined the three others already there: NASA’s Barry Wilmore and two Russian cos...
Billy Graham will celebrate another birthday this week, his ninety-sixth. As far as I know, he still lives, despite a lifetime of poor health: “hernias, retina clots, pleurisies, headaches, nauseas, removal of a salivary gland, urinary infections, ulcerative colitis, jaw abscesses, tumors on the forehead,” plus “cysts, polyps, infections, pneumonia, chronic high blood pressure, spider bites, and a series of falls that have broken eighteen of his ribs.” When he was twenty-six, he came down wi...
Fierce opposition has met the slightest steps forward in humankind’s war upon any of the several viruses that inflict us. Fear of the unknown, religious persuasions, and lack of knowledge of the scientific method have each contributed to that opposition. For example, in Boston in 1721, another smallpox epidemic broke out. Cotton Mather, the pastor at the old North Church, had learned of inoculation as a means to prevent the disease, but he could convince only a single one of Boston’s several doctors, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, to try the pro...
President Obama visited Stonehenge three weeks ago, on Friday, Sept. 5. As he stepped around the stones, he said, “ How cool is this. This is spectacular! Knocked this off my bucket list.” Stonehenge is located west and south of London, in south central England, and is a popular tourist destination site. It is astonishing to see. Prehistoric men, who lived on the British Isles then, stood a series of giant stones upright in a circle, and archaeologists believe that the first stones were pos...
Although President Obama has ordered airstrikes on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Pentagon is saying that “further strikes are needed in both Iraq and Syria to stop the militants from regrouping.” Then, from the Red Square in Moscow, Putin has “slowly ramped up his meddling in Ukraine, and with just enough uncertainty around each incremental escalation” so as to evade a larger war or a threat from the United States or western Europe. Then, today marks the thirteenth anniver...
Robin Williams was born in 1951, and I in 1953. Due to his rapid-fire wit, his zany antics and his overabundance of comedic talents, success came quick for him, more so than it did for others of our generation. In 1978, when I was trying to teach English composition to seventh- and eighth-graders in Lodgepole, Williams starred in his own television show, Mork and Mindy. Instead of learning to appreciate a poem’s text, my students would chant “na-noo, na-noo” – Mork’s nonsensical catchphra...
There are a lot of things I’ll miss about Sidney and quite a few that I won’t. As I prepare to leave for a new job at the beginning of September and look back on my year here, I’ve learned a ton and met many people who I’ll never forget. When I arrived here, I was skeptical that I could make any friends and thought that everyone would probably hate me. But I’d like to thank the people of Sidney for (mostly) welcoming me and making me feel at home in what was once a strange and foreign place. I’ll miss working with all the local officials w...
In an effort to raise students’ educational levels across the globe, the Program for International Student Assessment, encourages hundreds of thousands of 15-year-old students from sixty-five countries to take a two-hour test that covers just three subjects: math, science, and reading. In 2012, 510,000 students completed the test, and the PISA test scores reveal sobering news. The Shanghai Chinese students won first place in all three subjects, and Peru’s students took last place in all three. T...
Please stop taking selfies. For those of you who don’t know, a selfie is a photo one takes of oneself, usually on a cellphone. These photos are generally close-up face shots of people going about their daily business and trying to convince Facebook friends that their lives are much more exciting than they are in reality. If you don’t take selfies discourage your kids, your grandkids, your co-workers and your neighbors to stop. If you see someone holding up his or her phone at a jaunty angle, making a pouty-face and trying to get the per...
People are dying in the middle east. It’s news, but sadly, it’s not surprising. Our views on world events are shaped by our experiences. Because of that, I’m sure mine are different than yours. I am very far removed from the second world war. I was not alive when six million Jews were being slaughtered in the Holocaust and neither were my parents. Although watching footage and seeing photos of Holocaust survivors being liberated gives me a deep sense of shock and sorrow, I will never feel the same as those who saw those images in real time....
I think everyone wants some acknowledgement for a job well done. It’s nice to hear praise, whether it’s for your exceptional flower bed this summer or a project that kept you late at the office last month. Everyone needs positive reinforcement once in a while, but I think sometimes people feel they deserve their own personal cheerleader, when that would be a little impractical. How awkward would that conversation be if she starts cheering while you’re on the phone? We’re not all basketball players and we don’t deserve an entire fan section just...
I complain too much. I have a (hopefully) stable job that I actually enjoy, I have a roof over my head, albeit a very tiny section of roof and I have many people in my life that care about me. But I still feel the need to constantly complain about things that really aren’t that important. I think complaining makes us all feel a little bit better about our own personal plight and helps us to vent frustrations about whatever is going wrong in our lives. Complaints can be a good thing or a bad thing. I find legitimate complaints about a wrong d...
In March of 1992, three astronomers, Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy discovered their ninth comet, hence its name, “Shoemaker-Levy 9.” The team determined that S-L9 was orbiting Jupiter now rather than the sun. Because Jupiter is a heavy-weight planet, exerting an enormous gravitational pull, astronomers call it the solar system’s vacuum sweeper. In July of 1992, astronomers noticed that Jupiter’s force had broken S-L9 into 23 fragments that they labelled A through W and that ea...
All of you out there with children are braver folks than I. It’s not the financial responsibility that scares me. It’s not losing all my free time or devoting a large chunk of my life to other people that makes me hesitant to start a family. The thing that really makes me nervous to create my own little human being is the prospect that I might mess up. That would be a little different than misspelling a name in a story or forgetting to ask an important question in an interview, both things which make me cringe. It would mean that I’ve raised or...
We’re all fans of rules, regulations and principals, until those frameworks for living our lives apply to us personally in ways that we don’t like. Although we live in a very conservative area, I’ve met many people who are fiscally conservative until it comes to using government money to build something that they want, personally. It’s hard not to be that way. Of course you understand the merits of a program that benefits you or your business better than one that would help out someone else. Obviously you get why a feature in the communi...
Moments after the Supreme Court published its Hobby Lobby decision, a friend of mine posted a telling criticism on Facebook. “Thank you SCOTUS,” he wrote. “As a Hindu, I will now opt out of any Health Department requirement to exterminate.” My friend is not, so far as I know, a religious person. He does, however, own a couple of restaurants in Dallas. Across town, there is—or at least was, it’s been awhile since I’ve paid any notice to that city’s dining trends—a popular venue run out of a Hare Krishna temple. OK, it may have been a Buddhist t...
Joseph J. Ellis says in his book, Founding Brothers, “No event in American history, which was so improbable at the time, has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution.” In other words, Ellis contends that the revolution was not foreordained to happen. In 1760, few English-speaking people, either in England or in its thirteen colonies, believed in the likelihood of an American rebellion against King George III and Parliament. Few, if any, foresaw its approach. According to...
Stop telling small children that you know or you meet how cute they are. We have a habit of fawning over children and praising their parents for creating such cute kids. Most kids are adorable and parents like to hear it, however when you see a friend or acquaintance’s child and you always praise them for their looks, what are you really telling them? You are telling that child that one of the most important things about them—maybe the most important thing—is how they look. This is true for all children, but especially for girls. We have this...
Universal truths are hard to come by, when you think about it. We can all agree on “thou shalt not kill,” for example—until war, hoodies, bad guys with guns or the right to choose muddy the issue. Same with that “give unto Caesar” bit, which we pummel every year with jabs about just how much really belongs to government. Even more modern bits of advice, such as “don’t do drugs,” fail scrutiny when you consider the handfuls of behavioral modification pills we pump down teenage throats every month. But I would argue the case for one sage univer...
Next week some five hundred visitors will convene at the Real Bird Ranch, adjacent to the Little Bighorn Battle site, near Hardin, Montana, to watch the 21st Annual Battle of the Little Bighorn Re-enactment. For four days men will dress in cavalry soldier uniforms and ride their horses in the 7th U.S. Cavalry, under the command of Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer, played by Steve Alexander of Monroe, Michigan. Also, young Indians from the Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe tribes...
Many of the Americans I encounter seem to think they know a lot about geography. Most of them are wrong. When I lived in Denver and told anyone there that I was from Indiana, they would ask if I grew up in South Bend or Indianapolis. I had to reply, no, that I grew up about two hours from Indianapolis and five from South Bend. These people would often regale me of stories about relatives that lived in Indianapolis, like I somehow knew them or of the trip they took to South Bend. I really don’t understand this practice. I have never even been t...
I first heard of O.J. Simpson on television—black and white television, to be precise. During some long ago bowl game, the announcers kept referring to “Old Jay” Simpson, or at least that’s what I heard. I imagined a grizzled veteran named Jay, his hair dusted by age, slipping through the line of scrimmage. College kids looked old to a tyke like me, anyway. His college career was legendary, as was his time in the NFL. But those of us once forced to dial up friends from fixed positions or stop them on street corners to pass along the most re...
