Fur-bearing fish ...

I'm kind of surprised I didn't upload one of these postcards sooner ... after all, this is a true Montana legend.

People have been telling stories about fur-bearing fish in this part of the world for at least 80 years, and taxidermists have been encouraging the legend for just as long, by creating examples of the species. They're almost always trout, and the local version of the myth has them coming from Iceberg Lake up in Glacier Park. Other states have their own fur-bearing trout stories, too.

All in all, not quite as iconic as the Wyoming Jackalope, but still not bad. :)

Bad jokes ...

It's been ages since I've posted a bad joke ... so here you go. This is another excerpt from The North Dakota Joke Book, by Mike Dalton.

About eighty-five years ago a Montanan and a North Dakotan got caught stealing horses. Because there were no trees around to hang the horse thieves from, the Sheriff tried to hang them from a bridge.

The Montanan's rope broke, and he swam to shore and escaped.

As they were placing the rope around the North Dakotan's neck, he said to the Sheriff, "I hope this is a strong rope. I can't swim."

Psycho Sheep ...

Now here's my nomination for Most Ridiculous Montana Movie: Psycho Sheep of Butte. An extremely low-budget effort by a couple of Bozeman filmmakers, Psycho Sheep is a campy sci-fi horror parody ... with a storyline including space aliens and time travel, as well as carnivorous sheep and the Berkeley Pit. Maybe not the quintessential Butte film, but it definitely fits.

The movie is more than a little uneven, and you have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate it, but it worked for me. I actually have a Psycho Sheep T-shirt, something that's guaranteed to draw attention wherever I go!

Bigfoot (!) ...

As far as search engines go, I'm a definite fan of Google ... particularly Google Books, which as you might guess is an invaluable tool when doing a blog like this. It seems like you can find pretty much anything there.

Including, for example, the complete press run of the Weekly World News! I know you're wondering why anyone would want to have access to something like that ... but there are times when you just might be in the mood for a little badly-written, pop culture fiction.

There were at least a handful of Montana stories in the WWN over the years, including one on dinosaurs that had come back to life. And we actually made the cover of their December 30, 2003 issue, as you can see below. This tragic event supposedly happened out near Beaverhead Rock ... you can just ignore the fact that the vegetation in the photo isn't very Montana-like, and that the generic police car has a Musselshell County license plate Photoshopped to it. :)

North Dakota jokes ...

Back in the late 1970s an enterprising gentleman named Mike Dalton created a series of thin paperback books designed mainly for sale in Montana -- the North Dakota Joke Books. They were sold at diners and truck stops and souvenir stands, and quickly became part of the Montana popular culture. They've been out of print for ages, and are minor collectors items today.

The jokes themselves were pretty silly ... mostly, recycled ones that you'd heard a thousand times before but with different place names. But as anyone who's seen the movie Fargo knows, its extremely easy and entertaining to make fun of a North Dakotan. Today's quote is a sample from one of the joke books, and you might see some others later.

There was a North Dakotan who lived right on the Montana border. One day some surveyors came to his door to inform him that they had made a mistake years before and now the North Dakotans actually lived in Montana. "Oh, good," said the North Dakotan. "I don't think I could stand another one of those North Dakota winters."