Are you a trout fisherman? If so, I hope you savor every cast, every strike, every last fish you bring to the net between now and the day you lay down your rod for good. Enjoy these sleek, spirited gamefish that help make Montana one of the finest fishing destinations in the world. Because your children will be pike fishermen. The northern pike is laying waste to the trout population of Western Montana with such ruthless efficiency, it makes whirling disease look like a paper cut by comparison.

Here’s my grocery list: Meat, Fruit, Veg, Milk, Eggs, Cheese, Snacks. I’ll grab a cart for the first six items on the list, because I know I’ll be buying stacks of Top Loin Pork Top Chop Loin Top Chops of Pork, plenty of apples, bananas and oranges, and maybe one five dollar tomato that I will hoard like the last Fun Size Milky Way in a Halloween bag full of wax-wrapped candy and stale-ass Easter Peeps. I’ll hide my hot-house prize in the vegetable drawer, the one where we store root vegetables and what looks like some kind of knapweed experiment. Daddy needs his tomato.

Today marks the end of Week 1 of MontCAS testing at Missoula public schools. Montana Comprehensive Assessment System is a series of standardized tests administered each spring under the heinous, deceptively-named No Child Left Behind program implemented by Congress in 2002. You would think from the very title of the program that the federal government will be providing assistance to lagging or underperforming students, in order to improve the U.S.’s educational standards and better prepare our youth to compete on the international stage. Oh, hell no. NCLB is all stick, no carrot. Citing our “failing public schools” (which is bullshit), what President Bush and his duplicitous cronies did was create a system of punishment with no reward, putting pressure solely on state and local school systems to take several weeks away from their standard curricula in order to “teach to the test.” The MontCAS and other NCLB tests are geared solely to math and reading comprehension. No science, no social studies, no history, and none of that pesky arts and music that is cloggin’ up these kids’ heads.

Still digesting the first grilled food of the season. Every time I burp it smells like burnt moth wings. Of course I cleaned the grill, but most of my efforts went into the surfaces the food will be touching. Now that we’ve got that first grilled meal behind us, I’ll be scorching meat almost every day from now till around Halloween. If this global warming thing can’t be solved, I might even be flipping ribs into December this year. But after a full winter of squatting on the back porch looking like Darth Vader’s Thalidomide baby, my ten-year-old propane Sunbeam was in need of some major cleaning and maintenance. I started to pull off the heavy vinyl cover, and it quickly became apparent that I’d put in on after a few too many gin ‘n tonics last fall, not really waiting for the grill to cool off between drunken rounds of backyard horseshoes. The cover had melted to parts of the grill housing, so I used the burger flipper to pry it loose. Well, it was probably time for a new cover anyway.

Greeting, movie fans! Welcome to a fresh perspective, an alternative look at this year’s Oscar contenders. It’s fresh because I’m making it up as I go, giving opinion more weight than fact. It’s alternative on account of I haven’t seen most of the movies. It’s like this: I’ve got two middle-school-aged kids, an overworked wife, and a schedule crammed with doctor/dentist/orthodontist appointments, work meetings, impulse sleepovers, school concerts, recitals, sports practices, and the occasional hangover. Throw in a limited amount of disposable income, and you can see why I can’t go see a movie every damn weekend. I probably get to a movie theatre once, maybe twice in a year. If a movie doesn’t have a trailer playing on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel, I’m probably not going to see it until it’s out on DVD. Even then, I’ll usually have to watch it some afternoon while I’m folding clothes. While this scenario might not make me the optimum Oscar picker, I do have my opinions. And this here bully pulpit. So enough pussy-footin’! Let’s get to it!

The big news today is that President Obama wants to reduce the size of our nuclear arsenal. That’s a good start. He might just earn that Nobel Peace Prize yet. Now how about doing the same thing with the rest of the military-industrial complex? Current headlines may point at the bloated health care/insurance miasma as the biggest drain on our tax dollar, but compared to the defense budget, that’s just an election-year hockey puck being batted back and forth by the clueless boobs in Congress. Meanwhile, the defense department lumbers merrily along, sucking up half of this country’s resources into its gaping maw like Homer Simpson at a donut bar.

Rain and snow are predicted for tonight. I’ll see it when I believe it, I’m thinking. Weather forecasters have the most difficult and thankless job this side of being Dick Cheney’s therapist, and Old Man Mother Nature seems intent on proving them wrong. Especially when it comes to snowfall in Montana’s Banana Belt. When was the last decent snowfall we had? December? November? It seems like we had a couple of good storms early on, enough to open the ski areas and allow me to finally put the lawnmower away for the season. The kids got in one or two sledding sessions, but then the accumulation melted off. We’ve gotten a few minor dumps over the winter, but now we’re stuck in the February doldrums, with the filthy slush stubbornly clinging to everything like a wet booger on a clean finger.

Separation anxiety. Abandonment issues. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Auto-erotic fixation. Low self-esteem. Possible Napoleon complex. I tell you what, this family member needs some professional help in the worst way. But I’m not sure what kind of help I’m going to be able to afford. I mean, sure, I love him, but money is money. And he’s a dog. Houdini, our 8-year-old Daschund/Rottweiler/Ferret cross, is getting more neurotic with age. He’s physically pretty healthy, maybe a touch overweight. I was noticing that just this morning as I gave him a plateful of garbage. He’s developed a small lump on his side, that’s either a harmless fat nodule, or an Indian Manitou spirit embedded in his flesh. I’ll ask his vet when I take him in for his annual check up next month. Like most dogs, he’s motivated solely by food and sleep. So to the untrained eye, he appears to be pretty normal.

“Wash up, kids, your breakfast is ready.” I stood in the kitchen Monday morning, pushing scrambled eggs and fried potatoes from the frying pan onto the kids’ plates. I poured them a glass of juice, and set a napkin next to each place setting. “I sure miss your mom,” I said. Rusty and speaker sat down and immediately started wolfing down the food. “Are you making pancakes?” Speaker asked. “No.” She gave Rusty a look. “I miss her too,” she said around a mouthful of eggs. Welcome to Single Dad Week.

Here’s a good barometer of how well a movie is written: how many “memorable quotes” does it have on its imdb.com page? Pulp Fiction, the best black comedy of the last twenty years, currently has something like 18 pages of quotes, and it’s all killer, no filler. This one, for example, uttered by Marsellus after he’s been rescued, mid-rape, from the pawn shop hillbillies: “Don’t tell nobody about this. This shit is between me, you, and Mr. Soon-to-be-livin’-the-rest-of-his-short-ass-life-in-agonizin’-pain rapist here.” It’s a crime that this movie won only a single Oscar, but it’s fitting that it was for Best Original Script. [Profanity Alert: today’s column quotes the movie heavily. The movie contains profanity. Ergo, today’s column contains profanity.]