in which we discuss Michael Jackson, Willie Nelson, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Homer’s Odyssey, Slavoj Zizek, the algorithmic brains of Google, Mark Sanford, Twitter, the advertising wiles of Abercrombie & Fitch, and the ongoing infantilization of culture (on a Saturday no less!).

A tough day to be a blonde
Millions of us grew up in the ’70s and 80s playing “cowboys and indians” by day and staring at her poster by night.

Infinite Summer: Reading DFW’s Infinite Jest
I suppose I also wept a fair bit because his suicide frightened me. It raised the specter of suicide as a kind of foreordained trajectory, a price one pays for a Wallaceonian empathy, for a DFW-tuned brain. This is an age-old notion usually dismissed as sophomoric and romantic. Still, it’s not often in your life you read someone who reminds you that you’re not alone only to wake up one morning and find that once again you are.

Just Another Day at the Beach: 60 Million Years Too Late
Science has a way of creeping up on you. It’s sneaky—like classical music can be sneaky. One day you’re thrashing to the Ramones and Nine Inch Nails and the next you find yourself in tears in the middle of your living room because you just heard Lazlo Varga play a cello in ways you never thought possible and the strings’ vibrations reached out and bent you into a kind of fetal position of perverse ecstasy.

A Tale of Two Cities
Each June I become perversely interested in the Stanley Cup. Like a migratory bird, I wake up one morning in spring with my homing beacon dialed in to the NHL. It never fails. I don’t watch much hockey during the regular season, but from mid-to-late May through June I’m a crazed hockey fan.

Welcome to Montanamo Bay: Hardin Montana continues its campaign to become Gitmo North
Al-Jazeera? Yes, that network. The local news gave it all the shock-value of an invasion of the Taliban. In reality, the crew was two white dudes — one from D.C., one from Canada. It looked more like the invasion of the Nordic News Network. Not since Dick Cheney and his fishing guide swooped down in a Blackhawk helicopter to fish the nearby Bighorn have two white dudes garnered so much attention in Hardin.
Tripping on Food: My Own Version of Eating Local
When Fluitt and I used to travel on business together, we sought out the reptilian, the amphibious, and various forms of aquatic vertebrates for dinner. We went for alligator in Texas, frog legs in France, what we could only semi-translate as “pot-of-fish” in a tiny, dark, Korean restaurant off the Champs-Elysee; and something that looked like a half-fish-half-kimodo-dragon, perhaps more suited to an evolutionary exhibit than used as culinary enticement, that pulled us in off the street in a back alley walk up in Hong Kong.

The Darkness is Light Enough
Last night, like many around the globe, we shut off our lights in solidarity with Earth Hour. Now, it’s easy for me to get really cynical about these kinds of things. The event is, after all, a symbolic and licensed subversion which rather than producing the effect it desires, produces only a spectacle of that effect without any meaningful change (which is a kind of fascism, but I digress!

At the End of An American Metaphor: Santa Monica Pier, Route 66
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Police Room 619, September 12
September 12, 2009
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African Sausage
August 10, 2009
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Ten Most Influential Books
March 30, 2010
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Sioux Charley Trail, Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness (Winter Count #1)
March 7, 2009
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Sheep Shearing Video
April 8, 2009
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Welcome to Montanamo Bay: Hardin Montana continues its campaign to become Gitmo North
May 14, 2009
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Magic City Hen video & Expo this Saturday
September 16, 2011
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Some Dreamers Along the Golden Line
September 15, 2011
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The Mind Eraser
March 3, 2011
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Bright Edges of the Earth
December 21, 2010
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Acceptable Blasphemies: Reflections on Opening Day
October 27, 2010
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Welcoming Autumn
September 23, 2010
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Guy Bauwens: Brad, Unfortunately this is the only way I know...
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Brad Johnson: Annabel. well, I wouldn't say either sara or i ar...
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annabel: Sorry, meant Sara....
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annabel: I thought I might be getting a photo display of Bu...
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Seth Gilcreast: Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your weblog...
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Sundance: So true. Honesty and evryehitng recognized....
Most Read
- Police Room 619, September 12
- Where the Stress Falls
- American Sinai: Wovoka & the Ghost Dance of Walker Lake
- Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Ash Wednesday and the Mark of Cain
- African Sausage
- Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation?
- Reading Virgil on the New York Stock Exchange Floor
- The Shear Delight of Wool
- July 16th along the Jornada del Muerto
- At the End of An American Metaphor: Santa Monica Pier, Route 66
About This Site
140 miles east of cool is both a place and a space.
As a place, 140 miles east of cool is where I live–exactly 140 miles east of Bozeman, Montana in the “Magic City” of Billings, MT.
As a space, 140 miles east of cool lies at the margins of the metaphorical epicenters of the amenity west: places like Bozeman, Aspen, and Boulder.









