MT Day 3 - Mandibles, Microchips, and Meatloaf
Today I bid farewell to Helena, and headed to the fun college town of Bozeman for my first taste of Montana Comedy. It was just under a two hour drive, which at this point felt like nothing at all. To help wake up for my morning drive, I stopped at a Montana chain called City Brew Coffee, which aesthetically looks a hilarious amount like Starbucks to trick unsuspecting coffee drinkers. Personally though I felt like their coffee tasted better so I didn’t mind the light sense of deceit.
Along the way I stopped at Wheat Montana Bakery and Deli in Three Forks for a nice lunch. Wheat Montana started out as a family farm and grew to encompass 15,000 acres of wheat fields across the High Plains. Clocking at 5,000 ft. above sea level, these fields also produce grains at the highest elevation of anywhere in the US. While most of that high quality grain is sold in distribution, the company also specializes in making their own home-made breads and pastries and operating full scale bakeries and delis in multiple locations across the state. Visiting the bakery it was like being a kid in a carb-y candy store, but I managed to reign myself in and stay relatively healthy by just getting a turkey, lettuce, tomato, and cheese sandwich on their prize-winning sour dough bread. The sweet older woman working at the deli was only mildly horrified that I didn’t put a single condiment on the sandwich, but she was a trooper for making it against her better judgment. We also bonded because her son had done improv in college and she supported my trip implicitly. Truly I gain new moms wherever I go. As for the sandwich, it was nothing flashy but everything was delicious. The bread really did steal the show, and I wish I had thought to buy a loaf just to have in the car with me for snacking purposes.
With a happy belly, I made my way on to Bozeman and my first major stop of the day: The Museum of the Rockies. The museum cut an amazing figure aided by a wall of ominous clouds and the museum’s chief greeter, Big Mike, an incredibly complete Tyrannosaurus Rex discovered by the museum’s paleontology crews and coming in at a whopping 38 feet in length and 15 feet tall.
The Museum of the Rockies is a great big natural history museum celebrating the prehistory, geology, and life of the region. There’s also a planetarium and traveling exhibits that really could be about anything and everything, though when I went they were currently switching out exhibits so I had just missed my chance to see a bunch of Julius Caesar artifacts. I was a little bummed about that, but then I saw this totally goofy and charming kinetic sculpture illustrating the food cycle and it cheered me right up.
Montana is home to the Hell’s Creek Formation which has been one of the biggest hotbeds for dinosaur fossil finds in the country, so the Museum’s collection of prehistoric items is one of the finest and most comprehensive I’ve come across and is also thought to be the largest single collection in the US. It’s also very well curated to capture the imagination with a lot of the walls designed to look like primordial rock formations so I can imagine this place being a real hit with the kids. The exhibit started with some of the oldest things on earth in the form of meteorites (some of which were billions of years old) and stromatolites, funky looking fossilized mounds of cyanobacteria that were the dominant form of life on earth for 3 billions years.
From there life began to take on much more varied and complex forms in the oceans. The museum had a blend of fossils and more colorful dynamic stagings of what these weird ancient critters might have looked like in all their glory. Personally I was most impressed with how little shrimp have changed over the millennia. Who would have guessed they were such evolutionary champs?
Once those weird fishy boys crawled on land though that’s where things really take off, and the museum earns its reputation with some stunning complete dino skeletons. Some of the prominent pieces in the collection were the duck billed skulls of Montana’s state dinosaur the Maiasaura, including complete duck billed babies which reminded me of the Land Before Time and made me very happy. One of the creatures I’d never heard of before was a Cretaceous era 6 ft. long flightless bird called the Hesperornis, which based on the museum’s model looked like a giant evil penguin so that was fascinating.
The museum even gave visitors a peek into the curatorial fossil with windows looking into the paleontologists’ work stations as they made and cut casts of different fossils and assembled the skeletons. I’d only seen anything similar in the Museum of Ancient Life in Utah, so it’s really cool to get to see behind the scenes and into the process of how scientists are able to take hunks of rocks with maybe small fossil remains in them and get to the large impressive skeletons you see inside.
The Dinosaur gallery that really blew me away was called the Hall of Horns and Teeth. This hall collected some of the largest and most impressive skulls of some big name dinos like triceratops and T. Rex, but the thing I thought was extra neat was that they arranged the skulls from birth to adulthood so you actually get a sense of the lifespan of one of these behemoths may have looked like. This hall boasts one of the largest collection of triceratops skulls in the world as well as the single largest Tyrannosaurus skulls in the country. Looking at how massive the baby triceratops skull was, I’m so grateful on behalf of their mothers that they hatched from eggs.
The largest big ticket item here was one of the largest Tyrannosaurus skeletons clocking in at 12 ft. tall and 40 ft. from nose to tail. Even more impressive than its sheer size is the fact that this was the first known record of a female T.Rex (or She-Rex as the museum delightfully exclaims) because samples of tissue from the thigh bones revealed evidence of ovulation. Pound for pound that makes her the single largest feminist icon there is.
Other highlights of things I haven’t seen in other natural history museums included some fossils that gave rare insight into life for these dinos including a really well preserved egg patch and even a little baby that was fossilized in the very act of hatching. It’s crazy getting to see something so familiar and strange at the same time. I definitely got some Jurassic Park vibes, which it turns out is fitting because the curator Jack Horner was an advisor for all the movies and a partial inspiration for Dr. Alan Grant.
Slightly different than the Jurassic Park representations were the skeletons of raptors mid-hunt, which in the model form had a much more feathery mane revealing some more modern knowledge about dinosaurs than they had when those first films came out. It’s weird how something can look so scary and goofy at the same time.
The last creature I’d never heard of before were Oryctodromeus, which were dinosaurs that actually burrowed underground and lived in dens like monster prairie dogs. Judging by the faces on the models, scientists were also able to determine that they were first known example of total prehistoric nerds.
After bidding farewell to the former kings and queens of the world, I started going into exhibits about more recent Montana history. The first exhibit was a small but beautiful exhibit about the history of tourism in Yellowstone Park, which, despite being most associated with Wyoming, does take up a pretty sizable chunk of Southwestern Montana. I hadn’t actually realized that myself until I saw this exhibit, so it was cool to get a sneak peek of what I’d be visiting next week. There were a few historical artifacts and taxidermy animals from Yellowstone but the big draw in this exhibit for me was all the vintage photographs and modern photographs of the park in all its splendor. They even had early stereoscopes which were a neat marketing novelty, like Viewfinders from my childhood, that gave people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries their first experiences with 3D images. It was a fun little historical footnote to the already incredible panoramas and geysers in the photos themselves.
My absolute favorite was this dazzling photo of a waterfall that I was convinced had to be a painting for the longest time because I didn’t think nature could just look like this. It’s like real time impressionism because of the way the billowing waters shape and distort the light.
The next string of galleries were about Native American life in the Rockies. There was interesting history here, but for the most part i was just blown away by some of the beautiful artistry tat went into the clothes and pouches on display. The blend of beading, sewing, and dyeing of the different fabrics and materials was just amazing, and it’s hard not to see how the patterns and colors influenced and inspired generations of artists to come (particularly those well-respected, but noticeably White, Abstract Expressionists). It’s interesting how when these Native women (and sometimes men) did this work it ends up in history museums, but when Jackson Pollock does it you can sell it for millions. It’s not necessarily the takeaway I was supposed to get from this gallery but I was feeling too lazy to read, and that’s where my head went. From the clothing on display, I particularly enjoyed the cradle boards which allowed moms to carry little babies on safely on their backs while they got work done like precursors to our baby bjorns.
Another highlight of this gallery for me was a collection of homemade children’s toys, because it’s fun intersection of genuinely skilled arts and crafts with the childhood playfulness that I think is one of the biggest unifiers of all cultures throughout all time periods.
A more horrific highlight from this gallery, but an undeniably powerful one, was this photo demonstrating the excessive killing of buffaloes from white settlers and tourists traveling by trains. You’d hope the image was doctored in some way, but somehow at no point in the accumulation of this hellish mountain did anyone think “Maybe this is a little too much”. If you were somehow on the fence about whether we did more harm than good with the way we went about westward expansion, this should be a pretty sobering sight.
On a lighter note, the next gallery was a fun, surprisingly large space filled with different historic forms of transportation from covered wagons to automobiles. They even had a full old-timey gas station set up to give you a sense of the hospitality industry around the time of the first nature-loving tourists visiting Montana. I think my favorite car here for sheer silliness was a vintage wood bodied station wagon or woodie from the 1940s.
i almost didn’t think to look above me in the transportation gallery and I would have missed a real gem in the form of a classic homemade air plane built by two Montanans from 1930-1931 in their kitchen(!) from plans published in Modern Mechanics magazine. What a wild bit of local history, and the weirdest fact was that at that time Airplane fever was all the rage so it wasn’t even that uncommon for farmers and ranchers to just casually build working air planes in their spare time. It’s probably not the absolute safest thing in the world, but it’s pretty impressive and sort of whimsical nonetheless.
The last couple galleries were more dedicated to the daily lives of Montanans through the ages. This started with fur trappers and explorers including the town’s namesake John Merin Bozeman. Bozeman was an interesting figure and really kind of a classic American archetype: the intrepid con-man who just failed until he made it big. Born in Georgia, he just one day decided to totally abandon his wife and children and head out west to look for gold. He absolutely sucked at gold mining, and never really found anything. But then he and a partner, had the idea that they could “mine for miner” and make a big profit if they could find an easier trail to navigate across the west. The Bozeman Trail as I can only assume he insisted it be called ended up being a big success as it was useful shortcut for miners coming from the Oregon trail. He laid down the town also named after himself along the trail, and ran several small businesses until somebody murdered him at the age of only 30. Nobody knows for sure if he was really killed by Indians as his business partner claimed or if the partner actually did it to get a bigger slice of the pie for himself. It’s also possible that a rival rancher may have done it, because shockingly the kind of guy who just abandons a woman with three young kids was by all accounts not super nice and made some enemies for himself.
In the daily life exhibits, I was a big fan of the early 20th century artifacts like fancy porcelain toiletries and unnecessarily sleek art deco inspired razors. There was also all kinds of fancy pottery and old timey kitchen utensils that I couldn’t even begin to guess how you’re supposed to use.
I really got a big kick out of a 1950s Montana State College-approved swimming suit, because it looks like something from a Black and White movie. I do like the inclusion of a little belt, because while I feel like it sort of takes away from being an aerodynamic swimmer, it does leave at least a little room for cute self-expression in an otherwise completely modest garment.
And then what frontier house could possibly be complete without their own cannon! (it was actually from a little segue about military life back then but I have to make my little jokes or this blog doesn’t live up to it’s title now does it?)
When I left the museum, I was pleasantly surprised by how the overcast morning had turned into a totally beautiful afternoon, with that big blue Montana sky dominating the horizon.
My next stop in Bozeman was a weird and unexpected find just kinda tucked into an otherwise mundane office park: The American Computer Museum. The museum is free and spans over 4,000 items tracing the complete history of the computer and the information age. To my delight, the first exhibit didn’t start where I was expecting at all (I would have guessed after the discovery of electricity at the earliest) by breaking down computers to their fundamental functions: computing, relaying, and storing information. As such the museum started with some impressive historical deep dives, bringing out some historical adding machines and printing presses (the first devices to serve a purpose similar to what modern computers can do). They even had some original Babylonian Cuneiform bricks dating back to 1860 B.C.E which I wasn’t expecting to see in Montana at all let alone in a computer museum. It’s very cool though how they draw a throughline between all these seemingly unrelated artifacts to show how all technologies are built on the technologies that came before them and without that cuneiform block block maybe I wouldn’t be typing all this on my laptop right now.
One of the holy grails of the museum was a model of the Antikythera Mechanism, a complex clockwork device from roughly 87 B.C. discovered off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in an ancient shipwreck. After conservation efforts to put it back together, scientists believe it to be the earliest known analog computer used to calculate and record astronomical positions for calendar purposes. Because of its complexity historians believe there must have been earlier computational precursors, but this is the earliest one we have evidence of. The museum’s uses clear plastic instead of the original bronze so you can get a better look at the all the funky gears and inner workings, and it’s really a fascinating specimen.
The next gallery was a series of firsts, including the very first commercially available computer, the first microprocessor, and the very first desktop computer. It was wild that all these technological accomplishments ended up in this office space in Montana, and it’s even more crazy to see how far things have come in such a relatively short historical time frame. That first desktop weighed 250 lbs, had 4,096 bytes of memory, and cost $18,000 when it came out in 1965. That’s bananas.
Thankfully for us regular schmoes who don’t want computers the size of refrigerators, along came the Steves (Jobs and Wozniak). The museum honored them with a recreation of their famous garage where Apple and the personal home computer was born. Technically they weren’t the first people to develop a lightweight, affordable, home desktop with reasonable memory but their Apple I and II really set the gold standard for everything that was to follow and they were the firsts to do it in color! The museum even had a signed original Apple I hard drive from the Woz himself!
The next gallery was about the history of programming and automation, which interestingly enough can be traced back to weaving looms and Joseph Jacquard’s invention of a punch card system to streamline different patterns. Intentionally or not this was the first form of binary programming, and punch cards similar to that would be used in the first IBM computers and even to put a man on the moon. My favorite fact that I learned was that the first person to publish an algorithm for mechanical computation (effectively the first computer programmer) was a woman named Ada Lovelace who also happened to be the only legitimate child of the wild romantic poet Lord Byron. Even without the fun Byron connection, I thought that it was cool that such a male dominated field as programming was started by a brilliant woman.
The legacy of trailblazing ladies in computer science continued with a special display about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. Throughout her life she was a distinguished Naval Officer and computer scientist, but perhaps her biggest claim to fame is that she invented the first machine-independent computer programming language, COBOL. I just like that for being such a bad ass, she still had a fun sense of humor because she’s also credited with coining the term “debugging” after finding a moth on one of her computers and writing a note that said “First case of actual bug being found”
The next display was about the history of powering computers with electricity. I was glad that the museum gave Nikola Tesla the credit he deserved but which Thomas Edison stole from him during his life time. The story of some of Edison’s sleaziest tactics can be found in this very stirring historical drama here.
Now that we covered power and programming, the next exhibit was on the history of computer storage and memory. Having grown up in the age of microchips, I was positively shocked at the size of one early hard disk which took up most a wall and had only 8 megabytes of storage which 250 times less than even the most basic little iPod shuffle.
After breaking down the individual elements of computers, the exhibits literally shot for the moon with a collection of original pieces of technology from the Apollo moon missions including the last surviving NASA mainframe computer from the Apollo 11 mission!
The next gallery was a fun and quirky one featuring all kinds of Space Age technology from the mid 20th century when people wanted anything remotely technological to look like it came straight out of Flash Gordon. All the different metallic colors and funky shapes made for a really goofy and visually engaging walk down memory lane.
My favorite part of this room though was the cabinet of video game history including an original Pong console and all kinds of neat touchstones along the road to what I used to play growing up.
The next gallery was all about military technology and computers. These included things that kinda spooked me like the computer components from inside a Minute Man missile, as well as things that made me really geek out like an original Nazi Enigma machine and one Alan Turing’s Bombe machines that helped crack their codes. There’s something about decryption that really captures the imagination, because it’s probably the most high stakes puzzle solving people can really do.
And last but not least was the museum’s science fiction Hall of Fame which celebrates the potential future of computers as predicted by writers, artists, and moviemakers through the years. This mostly translated to lots and lots of robots, but there was lots of great geek memorabilia including Robby the Robot from Lost in Space and a bust of the Governator himself as well as lots of great art.
My favorite piece of Sci Fi art was this surrealist print exploring the left brain right brain duality (which as a pysch major I have to point out is largely a myth but it does make for fun visual metaphors)
After all that museum-ing around, I went to check out hip downtown Bozeman, which as a college town felt like it had a lot going on despite not being super big. I got some really great coffee at a place called Wild Joe’s Coffee Spot because there’s no way I could resist a name like that, and it helped me soldier on for the rest of my day. My favorite random sighting while I was walking was this advertisement in the window of a quirky clothing store, that I love but cannot even begin to understand:
I had a little bit of time to kill before dinner so I went to do some writing at the Public Library, and I was pleasantly surprised by what a sleek and beautiful building it turned out to be:
For dinner I went to a great brewpub called the Montana Ale Works, which was definitely a popular spot in town judging by how packed it was on a weekday evening. I started by sampling some fine Montana brews, getting a flight of the Gallatin Valley Lager from the Bozeman Brewing company, the Salmon Fly Honey Rye from Madison River Brewing, and the Knotty Latte Stout from Neptune’s Brewing. Everything was superb, with the light creamy Latte Stout unsurprisingly taking the cake for me, though the gentle mix of sweet honey and strong rye whiskey made the Salmon Fly a close second. For dinner, this place knocked my goddamn socks clean off with it’s Montana Meatloaf, consisting of local bacon-wrapped beef and pork, northern plains bison, caramelized onion gravy, mashed potatoes and veggies. It was simply divine, and a fine collection of basically all the different kinds of excellent meat products the Northwest plains can offer.
After my superbly hearty dinner, I made my way to a fun bar called Bar IX where my first open mic of the week was at. Due to a combination of it being a cool venue and one of the only real events happening on a weeknight in a small town, the mic ended up being pretty well attended and I really had a blast.
My favorite comic of the night was a woman named Jenna Liel (I don’t think I’m spelling her last name right unfortunately, but that’s at least partially a byproduct of it being such a good bar), who had really strong delivery of very silly bits with a liberal dash of social commentary. My favorite line was “The core tenant of feminism is pockets. Make more room for the 30 cents on the dollar we're missing”
Other Highlights:
Jake (the really fun and super nice Host)- I've been trying to drink less because it's good to have poops that aren't like 100 horses galloping and sneezing
Luke Hickey- The guys flying planes re in a cockpit. I don't trust that. It's unprofessional
Zachary Martinez - I’ve been getting into trouble for sneaking real issues into karaoke
Sophia- My dad was born in China and I know he grew up in communism because whenever he says something racist he turns the volume up on the speakers so the government can't hear him
Jennifer Jane- British yoga is just bullshit. "This will change your biochemistry" What?!
Garrison Coites- JK Rowling said Gandalf is gay
My own set went pretty well, and I feel like everything landed. I wasn’t able to find all that many mics any in Montana, so between having a good set and getting to hang out with some good funny folks I was glad that this got to be one of them.
Favorite Random Sightings: Big Bug Balloonatics (I have absolutely no clue); Big Paul's Pasty Parlor (referring to meat pasties, not nipple covers); Sassy Sisters (fun to say, no idea what the business is)
Regional Observation: If it wasn’t obvious from the meatloaf, the beef in this part of the country is really fantastic and also can almost always be interchanged with Bison if that’s your thing
Albums listened to: Tijuana Moods by Charles Mingus (one of Mingus’ favorites of his own albums); Time Out by The Dave Brubeck Quartet (a straight classic); Title by Jaya the Cat (just the song Wilderness)
People’s Favorite Jokes:
Not strictly a joke, but one of my baristas told me a funny story about how his buddy had never seen the word lingerie in writing and really embarrassed himself in front of his girlfriend after they passed by a billboard and he asked her completely in earnest, “What’s linger-ay?” It was a cute tidbit, and it’s fun getting people to share stuff like that to spice up their work days.
Songs of the Day:
Such a wild song
Take Five and Blu Rondo a la Turk are probably the more iconic songs but there’s something about this clip I just really love