And I must say – after this unseasonably warm autumn and winter, it is kind of nice to finally have real WINTER temperatures.

It started as a goose tangent over at AskeMeFi and sort of snowballed. Kudos to griphus for the laugh.

QUESTION: How do I best prepare a meal of swan and goose for me and my homeless friends?

ANSWER: SEAGOOSWAN

Ingredients:
1 Goose (live)
1 Seagull (live)
1 Swan (live)
1 Discarded coffee filter
3 Discarded cans of pet food (wet)
2 Loaves day-old bread from behind the deli
Asstd. vegetable peels

Preparation:
Prepare stuffing by mixing equal parts day-old bread, pet food scrapings, coffee grinds and vegetable peels.
Preheat empty garbage can to “on fire.”
Have goose, swan, seagull fight to death over one loaf of the day old bread.
Pluck, skin and remove entrails.
Stuff seagull with stuffing.
Stuff goose with seagull.
Stuff swan with goose.
Throw seagooswan in garbage can along with entrails for 1hr.

Serve!

We have a love/hate relationship with Great Falls. We enjoyed our visit but found that: (1) it’s windy … turns out that Great Falls is the fourth windiest city in the U.S; (2) it’s overrun with bars and casinos … no wonder billboards remind the locals that Montana has the highest drunk driving rate in the nation; (3) it’s economy appears to be teetering on the razor’s edge … Wal-Mart is the city’s third largest employer and (4) it is Ground Zero … some 200 long range nuclear missiles are buried in silos outside of town. Putting all these negatives aside, we enjoyed the historic downtown, green parks, museums and fascinating Lewis and Clark legacy.

Well…some truth to the criticism – it is windy, and their are lots of casinos – but “teetering on razor’s edge” is a bit much. Still, some good pix at their site.

And speaking of Horner…here’s a neat story from a few years ago, when I was still serving at Malmstrom Air Force Base.

The Wing Commander at the time was Colonel Everett Thomas (now a 2-star general); like most high-ranking leaders, he had a nickname – “T-Rex.”

When it came time for Col Thomas to transfer to another base, each of the organizations on base, as is custom, came up with neat little gifts to wish him well. Such gifts are often “location”-specific, to remind the departing person of their time in that assignment.

As the “exec officer” of the Medical Group, I was tasked with trying to come up with something unique to present to Col Thomas on behalf of the medics. I figured it might be cool to get him something T-Rex and Montana related, so I emailed the folks at the Museum Of The Rockies, explained that our base commander was awesome, etc, and would they possibly be able to send me a T-Rex book from Dr. Horner, possibly even autographed? I offered to pay whatever they deemed appropriate. I hit “send” and didn’t hear back from them…

…until three weeks later, when I received a package in the mail – sure enough, it was an autographed copy of one of Horner’s books, personally signed for Col Thomas!

And they didn’t charge me, which was pretty nice of them, too. So kudos to Jack Horner and his MOR crew!

Wobbly sign forces Baja Fresh to evacuate…trees and power poles down…power outages and traffic signals out…blowing dust from Gore Hill causing big dust storm…

UPDATE: here’s a picture from my friend Chuck (not his house); click the image to see a photo gallery of more wind damage at KRTV.com.

Fechter.com explains it (and has a handy map): County numbers were originally assigned based on most populous to least populous counties; sequence numbers were assigned about 1930 and have not changed since then. A plan was proposed in the 1999 Legislature Session to change things, but it was defeated.

I absolutely love that Butte/Silver Bow has retained the coveted #1 spot, even though Butte’s days as the largest town in Montana are long gone. Butte “made” Montana in so many ways, and it earned that #1 plate.

And I love that Cascade County – home! – is #2, despite falling behind Yellowstone, Missoula, Flathead, and Gallatin counties in recent years, population-wise.

Here’s the list of license plates by county; you can read more at BPRLicensePlates.com.

UPDATE: longtime blogger ZenPanda has a Flickr collection of ALL 56 PLATES! Here’s a sample – check ‘em all out here!

Rumors of the Ox coming to Great Falls go all they way back to 2004.

Oh, and you know that old saying about how the camera adds 10 pounds? Bear in mind that I had THREE cameras trained on me during this segment.

As always, I ordered my sandwich plain – just meat and cheese. No lettuce, no sauce, no ANYTHING except meat and cheese and bread. Krista ordered a simple salad with some gyro meat. The waitress repeated the order back to us, no problems.

And we waited…and waited…and waited…for 25 minutes, and when our meals were finally brought to us, my roast beef and cheese sandwich was overflowing with – yep – lettuce. And no dressing for Krista’s salad.

On a more positive note, it only took about three minutes for them to bring me a plain sandwich – and it was pretty good.

So if you’ve got a hankering for a SOX sammy, my advice is to give it a week or two until they work out the kinks.