THE UGLY: The brain cancer that claimed the life of 10-year-old Jayci Yaeger while her father is serving a four-year sentence for a drug conviction at a federal prison facility in Yankton.

THE BAD: That Jason Yaeger's own bad choices kept him from sharing precious years of his young daughter's too-short life.

THE GOOD: That federal authorities in Yankton allowed Yaeger to visit Jayci in the hospital two days before her death and to attend his daughter's funeral on April 1.

THE BEST: If Yaeger dedicates his life to raising his surviving daughter, Shelby, 8, once he's out of prison.

THE GOOD: A self-guided audio tour of Mount Rushmore National Memorial that won the Director's Award for Excellence in Interpretive Media from the National Park Service. It includes historic recordings of sculptor Gutzon Borglum and interviews with original workers, as well as the Native American perspective.

THE BAD: The inane screenplay for the movie "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," which was partly filmed at Mount Rushmore. Even the breathtaking beauty of the Black Hills couldn't save that bad movie.

THE GOOD: A slight decrease in the percent of overweight and obese schoolchildren in South Dakota. During the 2006-07 school year, 32.9 percent of students fell in those categories, down from 33.8 percent of students the previous year.

THE BETTER: A federally-funded nutrition program will make daily snacks of fresh fruits and vegetables available at three public schools in Rapid City next year: General Beadle, Knollwood and Canyon Lake. Now serving 4,000 students in 10 schools on the Pine Ridge Reservation, it expands to 25 additional sites next year, reaching nearly 10,000 kids across the state with nutritional foods they might not otherwise eat.

THE BAD: November's general election ballot won't include a proposed wholesale alcohol tax that would have increased the per-drink cost of beer, wine and liquor by about 10 cents and helped counties fund alcohol-related law enforcement needs. Supporters of the tax increase didn't have enough time to collect the necessary 16,776 signatures by the deadline last week.

THE GOOD: That South Dakota manages to benefit from federal largesse in the form of taxpayer dollars for federally-funded projects. Whether you call them wasteful pork barrel spending, as the Citizens Against Government Waste does, or responsible funding of well-deserved services, as many South Dakotans do, our state ranked seventh in federal money directed to states by earmarks.