Boise News

WE NEED YOUR HELP WITH BURLINGTON NORTHERN SANTA FE

Dear Mr. Buffett:

I read with interest and glee about your recent acquisition of the majority ownership in Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). Congratulations on buying a great company--investment wise, I should clarify, because BNSF is a not-so-great company on the public relations front.

Now that you own the railroad, you can change that bad image with one phone call and instantly make your new acquisition--and yourself, of course--a corporate saint out here in Montana.

public transit

Public transit, such as Boise’s proposed streetcar, is bad for the economy and bad for the environment. Just ask Randal O’Toole, who works on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues at the Cato Institute, and who spoke in Boise today about public transit, particularly in Portland.

By the way, O’Toole also believes that urban planners caused the recession, that they’re using social engineering to try to turn the U.S. Communist, and that all roads should be privately owned.

Western Book Roundup

Economic conditions and their implications for the book industry continue to be dire, and yet I have mostly good news to report this week.

• First, several prestigious literary magazines across the nation are facing budget cuts or conversion to online-only publication, including the New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review, but in Boise, according to Idaho Review editor Mitch Wieland in an interview with Boise Weekly, “While other universities are cutting their budgets for their literary magazines, the administration here at [Boise State] has actually increased our funding in support of what we do.”

Wieland spoke to Bill English of Boise Weekly last month on the occasion of the publication of The Idaho Review‘s tenth anniversary issue.  It didn’t take long for The Idaho Review to vault into the top tier of literary magazines, with its stories and essays regularly winning national awards.  Writer and Boise State teacher Alan Heathcock told the Boise Weekly:

“The success of The Idaho Review is all Mitch Wieland.  Every journal in the country is writing letters to big name writers, asking them to send work. Mitch has some special charm that when he asks Rick Bass, William Kittredge or Ann Beattie, they not only send work, but they send great work. Ten years ago, Boise State didn’t even have a writing program, and now is known nationwide largely because of the reach and reputation of The Idaho Review.”

• My second bit of good news: Bill Husted, gossip columnist for the Denver Post, reported Sunday, “HBO is developing a movie based on Denver author Steve Knopper’s book Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.”

Also in the Roundup: How the boxer Rocky inspires writer Benjamin Percy, a vintage Cormac McCarthy ad in Dwight Garner’s Read Me, and how books by women were left off a key best-of-the-year book list.

UM Activism for the Planet

UM has now launched its new Climate Change Studies minor program, the first of its kind in the nation. Last spring, the Green Thread Initiative held its first workshop to help professors introduce climate and sustainability topics into their curriculum, allowing more environmental dialogue throughout campus. Faculty members across campus are directly addressing different aspects of climate change in their own work, creating an interdisciplinary curriculum and minor through departments from economics to journalism, forestry to ethics, and science to law.

Students like me are gaining valuable skills through this strong education in science, society, and solutions to climate change. The Environmental Studies Department is even funding two of us to represent UM at the international climate treaties in Copenhagen this December. My environmental studies major together with this climate minor are providing me critical advocacy skills, and I know that I am not the only student that UM has helped become empowered in enacting change.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I love art. You love art. John loves art. We all love art. But a vehicle’s license plate is no place for art. That’s what I’ve been bitching about for years in Montana, as the debate periodically bubbles up about the ever-fancier license plate design. “I want more clouds.” “I want more buffalo.” “Too much blue.” “I don’t like the slogan.” “It needs to be 3-D and have a vampire.”

Wise up, critics. Look, if you need to drive around with a Dolack displayed on your vehicle, put one on the rear window. Or paint some ducks in a tub on your hood. Or, better yet, express yourself with a clever vanity plate. How’s this one: UB6IB9. Or this: 4NIK8R. Don’t like those? Well, UPURZ2. That takes a whole lot more imagination than plopping down an extra fifty bones for a license plate that looks like something out of an Eddie Bauer catalog.

From the Panhandle with Cate Huisman

Individuals may differ on whether they prefer a metaphorical existence as relatively small creatures in large, imposing bodies of water (like Seattle, for example), or massively important animals in puddles whose global significance is less evident (except to them, perhaps). In the latter, one person’s action can make a substantial difference, as it did last week in Hope, Idaho (pop. 86).

Voting numbers here are on a whole different scale than those that pop up on John King’s magic map on CNN, and the tax override levy in Hope was a vote that King did not cover. But it was an important issue for residents of this lakeside burg, whose municipal coffers have long depended on receipts from logging 120 acres of timberland that it owns. With rising costs in the town and falling fortunes in the timber market, an alternative source of revenue had become essential.

After Grace: Libby, Montana Fights On

New studies and health initiatives are unfolding in Libby this fall, all of them tied to the former vermiculite mine operated by W.R. Grace & Co., which left the town contaminated with a uniquely dangerous form of asbestos.

Back in June, federal officials announced a public health emergency Libby, Montana, helping pave the way for the town to get a $6 million health care grant to deal with the extraordinary number of people in the area who suffer from asbestos-related diseases. Today is the grant’s kickoff date, which means the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will now start spending the money to identify and treat people who have asbestosis (a scarring of the lungs), mesothelioma (a rare and agressive cancer), or other medical problems due to asbestos exposures.

New West Book Review

Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 268 pages, $19.95

Best of the West 2009 is a welcome revival of anthology series that ran from 1988 through 1992, collecting outstanding stories set in “the Wide Side of the Missouri” that previously appeared in literary journals.  Unlike some recent one-off Western story anthologies, such as New Stories from the Southwest (also edited by D. Seth Horton) and Forge Books’ Best Stories of the American West, Volume I, the editors plan to make this an annual publication, and in the 2009 edition, the quality of the stories is just as high as those in the well-known national Best American Short Stories series.

In the foreword, Rick Bass tries to put his finger on “what constitutes a Western short story,” and although he notes, “Is it my imagination, or are there extra teaspoonfuls of loneliness in these stories, extra pinches of desperation?” and “a good many Western short stories tend to possess a kind of intensity or power of the felt physical senses,” he decides, “I’m not convinced there is a Western short story, yet.” Bass doesn’t remark on it, but in this year’s anthology, the overwhelming common theme is sex: the people in these stories might be lonely, but they manage to partner up pretty well.

Column: Politics

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has announced she’s running for Senate in California, hoping to unseat Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.

Long one of Boise’s biggest employers, HP is part of Idaho culture. It didn’t take long for the Fiorina chatter to show up on Idaho blogs, including Tom von Alten’s Fort Boise. von Alten, a mechanical engineer who worked at HP for twenty years and still holds stock in the company, wrote, “Her campaign slogan will presumably not be ‘Let me do to the country what I did to HP,’ but I have no doubt she will put a positive spin on every aspect of her career to date.”

As a longtime resident of Boise with friends who worked at HP, I’ve sat at many a dinner party where people told tales of how, instead of “bringing people together,” she repeatedly did the opposite. Notorious for egotistical, divisive and manipulatory tactics, one of her biographers, Michael Malone, said Fiorina “created a pestilential culture” and “a poisonous stew.”

There are numerous reports of employees literally cheering and dancing in the aisles the day her “resignation” was announced.

From the Panhandle With Cate Huisman

The Sandpoint City Council hit a hot button last year when it proposed a temporary restriction on the construction of drive-through fast-food places. Council members wanted some time to consider how this kind of land use fit with the newly minted Comprehensive Plan, and the city had sprouted a drive-through Jack-in-the-Box while the plan was being cogitated over. Shortly thereafter, a corrugated metal farm shed turned up next to Highway 2 that turned out to be a drive-through convenience store.

After the ban was passed, certain members of the community vehemently voiced their disapproval, and one owner of a restaurant that had both drive-through and sit-down options posted a notice on the order counter suggesting that the city planning director go back to where he came from, inspiring some other community members to dine elsewhere.