Musical Starstreams & Missoula

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January 16, 2021

Years ago when I lived in Missoula, I used to listen to KUFM. Public radio from the University of Montana.

Every Sunday night at about 9 o’clock for a few hours, KUFM would broadcast a program called Musical Starstreams. It was an interesting mix of quasi-electronic cross ambient New Age music that was somewhat unusual considering the other genres of music played locally on the radio at the time.

I was first introduced to New Age music on a channel over in the Seattle area during post grad studies at the time called KNUA (tagline: music for a new age). After college and upon my return to Montana, I landed in Missoula. After living in Missoula for a number of years, I began listening to public radio and that’s when I discovered Musical Starstreams.

During those years I had grown increasingly tired of the standard genres of Rock and Country music — Stations in Missoula and other communities here in Montana served up the same music to be played over and over and over again in an endless mundane cycle of redundancy that might drive anyone looking for something new out of their ever loving minds. You can only listen to the same songs over and over again, so by the time I found the quirky programming of KUFM, I was quite ready for a change.

Musical Starstreams is owned and operated by Forest and according to his website:

Forest is the producer, programmer and host of MUSICAL STARSTREAMS, the USA’s first (December, 1981) syndicated, electronica based commercial radio program. Over the years, Starstreams has been heard on over 200 commercial and non-commercial stations including a majority of the Top Ten USA markets, daily on XM satellite radio, DirecTV, radioIO.com, mixcloud.com and iHeart.com.

You can listen to Musical Starstreams programming below in the footer of this page. I hope that you might find the program as interesting as I have.

Happy trails.

CCHD Mask Mandate

By

Alan

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January 8, 2021

Recently, a co-worker, who just a few days prior had tested positive for the Corona Virus asked me if I was concerned about his positive test. I told him that I was more concerned about forgetting to wear my belt to work that day. Pulled my pants out of the dryer that morning freshly laundered and they fit so well that I had overlooked putting my belt on before heading out the door.

Anyone with a good used pair of Wranglers can most certainly relate.

The whole business of our County Health Departments across the state pre-emptively calling for and/or maintaining mask mandates on their own without any accountability and outside of any new future recommended policies regarding such at the state level is a bit of a stretch.

County Health Department recommendations on various infectious diseases is all fine and well, but since when is it the place of that same County Health Department to “mandate” that the general public do anything?

Analogy

Wearing a mask might protect me from illness, just like wearing a coat might keep me warm.

My wearing a coat won’t keep everybody warm just like my wearing a mask won’t keep others from becoming ill — (I’m not ill in the first place, so at least there’s that).

The only person the mask protects is the person that’s wearing it.

But yet, here we have the County Health Department, in essence, saying that you have to put your coat on so others can stay warm. Never has there been such a level of absurdity, as the argument that says putting your coat on will keep others warm. Our local health directors are pretty good at doing a lot of things, but they fail at any semblance of making a convincing argument when it comes to coercing the masses.

Virtue signaling is about as nonsensical as it gets, and shame on our health departments for falling for it.

You aren’t protecting 10 people when you wear a mask — you’re protecting you, and only you, and your protection is contingent on if and when you come into contact with a sick person who’s too stupid to stay home.

The only way you can protect 10 people is to stay home when you’re sick. Wearing a mask in public when you’re sick does “nothing” — the germs are on your hands and on your clothes and even on your cash or debit/credit card. If you’re sick, you will absolutely infect others regardless of whether you wear a mask or not.

Searching for the Montana Blogosphere

By

Alan

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January 4, 2021

I think I might have spent the first few days of this happy new year perusing the internet trying to find out what happened to Montana’s once vibrant blogosphere. I happened across an article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle that talked about just how the Montana bloggers are making noise.

The article touched on a few points with regard to how important blogging could be as an augmentation to big media and journalism.

The article talked to a few once fellow bloggers — David (GreaterFalls.com) Sherman, Rob (Wulfgar “A chicken is not pillage”) Kailey, Matt (leftinthewest) Singer, Craig (mtpolitics.net) Sprout, among a few others, and discussed some of the reasons why they might blog. We all blog for different reasons — some serious, some not so serious, and still yet, some others between the two.

I guess I was mainly trying to come up with some sort of blog roll this weekend as I spent seemingly countless hours in the internet archives.
My time away since 2009 saw me in Texas working on FEMA housing after hurricane Ike, and later in Seattle re-starting my web development business.
Along the way I had the chance to catch up with Craig Sprout in San Antonio for a visit, and at other times I never really ever quit looking at our Montana blogs (though I wasn’t actively blogging at the time).

With the exception of a few remaining hardy souls, like David In Great Falls (formerly greaterfalls) , most of those, or us, in the once thriving Montana blogosphere don’t blog, or haven’t blogged in quite a while.

Even still, I managed to scrape together, albeit a rather minimal, blog roll.
Doug (Montana Misanthrope) Dodge and Alan (The Raving Norseman) Tooley are both gone (they are still around, they just aren’t blogging) — 4&20 blackbirds hasn’t posted since 2015 and Wulfgar hasn’t posted since 2018.

All was not lost in my quest to scrape together a blog roll however. In the course of my search I might have discovered a few other quite interesting bloggers who weren’t around in Montana’s blogging heyday.

One blog I found that was somewhat intriguing is Reptile Dysfunction, and I think I might be inclined to continue giving it a read. I lived in Missoula for just under 20 years before claiming refugee status here in Great Falls back in 1989.

At any rate, This new blog of mine is called Cookies & Cowpies … I have wide ranging interests and a pretty good number of even more varied opinions on those interests. I’ll pretty much post what might suit me depending on which interest might speak the loudest on any given day.

Greg Gianforte to be sworn in January 4

By

Alan

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January 3, 2021

Gianforte, currently a representative for Montana’s at-large House district, won 54% of the vote in the November election, and he won with the largest margin for a non-incumbent governor since 1920, according to KULR8. According to state data, Gianforte received more votes than any candidate for governor in Montana history.

Republicans gained control of every statewide office after the November election and hold majorities in the Montana House of Representatives and Senate.

Gianforte will face the immediate challenge of tackling Montana’s COVID-19 response. He has signaled a willingness to reverse outgoing Governor Bullock’s mask mandate, but in an interview, said he would be wearing a mask to set an example for Montanans.

“I trust Montanans with their health and the health of their loved ones,” Gianforte told KHN. “The state has a role in clearly communicating the risks of who is most vulnerable, what the potential consequences are, but then I do trust Montanans to make the right decisions for themselves and their family.”

History will remember Liquid Ass

By

Alan

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January 3, 2021

Meet Alan Wittman and Andrew Masters – the guys who refused to grow up but got rich anyway. They’ve made a killing out of marketing a one-of-a-kind spray called ‘Liquid Ass’, which makes anything smell as bad as it sounds!

The product was born several years ago when Wittman was in high school – his parents had gifted him a chemistry kit and he used the ingredients to invent a smell that had a whiff of “butt crack, kind of sewer smell, with a little hint of dead animal in there.” He used it to play a prank on an English teacher he wasn’t very fond of, and that’s when he realized that what he had on his hands was a real weapon.

But the concoction wasn’t useful to him until about 10 years ago, when he was about to get fired from a truck manufacturing company. Things got pretty bad between him and the management, so along with his friend Masters, he decided it was time to bring out his trusty old weapon again.

Wittman and Masters spilled some Liquid Ass near the microwave in the office break room and then let the scent work its magic. It stunk up the whole place and the engineers had no clue where the stench was coming from. They fixed the water main, replaced the microwave, pulled up the carpet, and even closed off the bathrooms, but nothing worked. Naturally, the duo didn’t work at the company much longer, but they already knew what they were going to do – make sure Liquid Ass was accessible to everyone who needed it.

Despite having their own financial commitments, Wittman and Masters each pooled in $18,000 towards production and marketing. Their families, understandably, thought they were crazy. Wittman’s wife was dead against the idea and Masters’ family thought he’d lost his mind. But they stuck to their belief in the product and two years later, their instincts proved right – Liquid Ass became a huge success.

You can learn more about this dynamic duo by visiting their Website …