My “Brush with Rush”

I really miss Rush Limbaugh…the consummate broadcast professional. Thankfully, when I did get to speak with him, he did pay me a sort of compliment. The rest of my call was unremarkable, actually…but I’ll never forget how it began.

Regardless of how one feels about politics, it’s irrefutable what an amazing broadcaster Rush was or his impact on broadcasting in general. I didn’t listen every day, even though I was a subscriber, but I’ll miss him forever.

Apparently this idiot is still out there doing his thing

I woke this morning to a buzz online about a CBS Sunday Morning story which ridiculed North Dakota. Its focus was the “controversy” over the location of the Geographical Center of North America™ and the validity of various claims to its location.

The story itself is really entertaining, but it has one boil on its bottom: Clay Jenkinson. Fond of his own voice and written word, he apparently couldn’t resist the opportunity to attempt to elevate himself by ridiculing North Dakota. Which is no surprise; every time I’ve encountered something Clay Jenkinson has produced, it’s come across as overly wordy, rambling, and “too smart by half” – not to mention self-serving. But he lays claim to representing North Dakota and the prairie lifestyle, somehow…except when looking down his nose at them can elevate his image in his own eyes, apparently.

This piece could have had entirely different tone if not for a purported “scholar” attempting to distinguish himself by ridiculing the state he claims to love and represent. I’m actually surprised anyone is still paying attention to this braying jackass. So I guess it’s time for a meme:

“I’m a loser, baby…”

2020 was ridiculously busy for me. 2021 hasn’t been much better. It’s been almost two months since I’ve posted on this blog, and longer than that since I’ve been able to roam my beloved state with my cameras. But this travesty managed to bring me to my keyboard to speak out. Perhaps it can serve as a catalyst for me to load up my truck, hit some section lines for some photography, and come back to share images which prove that we’re anything but a “loser state.”

I wish I’d been able to thank him at the end

Well, it’s official: Video Action is closed after around 33 years. I’d been a customer for most of them. When it was announced in mid-November, I had a mixed reaction: part remorse that we’d be losing Video Action, and part surprise that they’ve been able to hang on as the last remaining video rental business in town.

This is where we’d come for all the new releases. In fact, even before many of them would hit the now-popular streaming services, you could find them on shelves ready to rent. Lately, though, I’d find myself stopping in for older movies that are otherwise hard to find.

Once the decision to shut ‘er down was official, things began to go on sale. I walked out with a large stack of some of my favorite movies going back to the 90s or earlier, thrilled to own some of them but sad that they mean the end of an era.

I remember the first day that movies went on sale: it was a Sunday, so I went after church. The place was packed. New releases sold quickly, but I was looking for older treasures.

Before long, the shelves began to empty. Prices dropped, and even more movies found new homes – permanent homes, this time – as December 31st approached. The building had been sold, and during one of my repeat December visits, someone bought the OPEN sign from the window.

I shot a few panoramas for old time’s sake, as I’m sad to see this local landmark go. I’m a big movie fan, but I have to admit that even I had begun visiting the store much less frequently. We view movies differently now, with streaming services and Redbox taking aim at the traditional video store. The fact that we still had Video Action up until 2020 is a noteworthy achievement.

I didn’t know the saddest part of the story until recently: Don Loeks, the owner who founded Video Action in Bismarck and Fargo, passed away recently. I remember wondering if I’d see him during the last month of the store’s operation, but then I heard the news of his passing and it made the closing even more of a sad occasion.

You can read Don’s obituary here or here.

I’m thankful that we had Video Action for so long, thanks to Don’s passion for movies and games. It’s clear that this store was a labor of love for him, and his commitment to that brought a lot of joy to moviegoers in the Bismarck-Mandan area for over thirty years. He and Video Action will be missed.

Seems like a reasonable settlement with the government – so guess who’s unhappy

I woke up this morning to find this newly posted Bismarck Tribune article and began to take interest in the situation. I think I recall hearing something about this before, but the resolution is what stood out to me this time.

The article is a little light on a couple of key facts. First, while the description of the land “managed by the BLM” is accurate, it should state that the land consists of a couple of thin strips of land sandwiched directly between the two parcels owned by the private landowner. Not a huge deal, but it does paint a better picture.

The green shaded area is actually two slices of land. Well, the access road and pond cross it. Fair enough. I think the arrangement described in the article is actually reasonable; the idea of locking horns with the BLM is not an experience one would normally desire, yet this outcome seems the most practical and even fair. And it seems prudent that the landowner could be given the option to purchase the land in the future.

So, naturally, someone is unhappy.

The article references “Blogger Jim Fuglie, a frequent visitor to the Badlands” as the one who made a big stink about this in the first place. He thinks that this decision is wrong, and that the landowner should be forced to remove this bridge and build a new one (certainly at great expense). It doesn’t matter that this would – and the BLM agrees about this – create entirely new impacts to this and an additional area of the Little Missouri River and surrounding Badlands.

So that makes sense: here we have a project that had minimal impact, was done carefully, and is actually helping cut down on lots of traffic, and wouldn’t even be an issue except for that little strip of land (the Army Corps of Engineers even granted a permit for the bridge). Riiiiiiiiiiight. Let’s cause more impact, just so we could punish some sinister rich guy. Because, let’s face it, who among us can afford to build his own bridge?

Naturally, the person who comes to such a brilliant conclusion is a prominent Democrat, the second fact that this article stays far from disclosing.

Jim Fuglie has been a director of the Dem-NPL party twice over the years, and he’s a political blogger as far as I recall. If my buddy Rob Port had been quoted in this article, you can bet he’d have been described as “Political Blogger Rob Port” for his Say Anything blog. But Jim Fuglie is just described as some well-meaning wanderer, blogging about who-knows-what, who uncovered this huge injustice with the help of a pixel-peeping friend. I’m not buying it.

Naturally, since there are prominent Democrats involved, there’s hypocrisy. A heaping helping of it.

Fuglie is quoted as saying, “There’s really no reason anyone should be allowed to get away with breaking the law that flagrantly and not pay the price for it.” Okay, I think we can all agree on that. And the landowner is being punished with triple rent and that sort of thing, as both sides work out the details of this infraction.

But what if the landowner was someone who, say, violated the border of the United States, entering our country illegally, also involving a river and federal law? Shouldn’t that person be punished? Not according to the political party which the aggrieved Fuglie has represented for decades. In fact, I’m probably going to be called a Racist™ for even pointing this out. Nay, that person should be greeted with open arms, granted public benefits at the expense of American citizens, and instructed on how to vote Democrat.

This is no surprise, since the Democrat Party epitomizes the “Some are more equal than others” mantra from Orwell’s famous book Animal Farm. And that’s how their ideology works: there is one set of rules for them and the people they favor, and another set for the rest of you idiots who have either the audacity or idiocy to disagree with their enlightened views.

So my takeaway from this article is that we have an example of the federal government actually working with a landowner to resolve a unique issue. Meanwhile, a prominent Democrat operative gets to look like a quasi-hero by doing what liberals do, without his ideology or political interests being identified, and with total hypocrisy when it comes to the rule of law.

The first takeaway is unique and encouraging, while the other is business as usual.

11 years before the Enchanted Highway? Geese in Flight

Articles like the one pictured above have indicated a resolution over whether or not a giant metalwork along I-94, erected in 2001, can stand and be accessible to the public. I had to include a screenshot of the article above because it pictures the atrocious misspelling of the words “temporarily” or “enchanted” – the latter being an especially important word in this case. I make my share of typographical errors as well, probably even within this post, and usually while pointing out someone else’s typos. But I feel compelled to point out that “enchanted” might be one of two words they’d really want to get right.

An astute person commenting on Facebook pointed out that an ornament like this actually appeared in the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands, so I had to look back in my collection to be sure. Yep…there it is. That made me even more curious, so I had to hit “the Google” for a minute.

A quick search for “geese sunburst wall ornament” produced a ton of results. That was a surprise. Apparently this design has been out there in various forms for a long, long time in a surprising number of permutations.

I’m not going to accuse “Geese in Flight” of being an act of plagiarism; more likely it may be an homage to such ornaments, which have apparently graced many a living room over the years. Personally, I think it’s an eyesore…but I’ve always been under the impression that it’s an original eyesore. Apparently not, since it’s been gracing living rooms since the twentieth century. One learns something new every day!

Imposter website warning…but it’s been sitting like that for a year and a half

I spotted a Bismarck Tribune article tonight on their website (I don’t subscribe) that caught my eye.  Apparently the Bismarck-Mandan CVB would like you to know that the website www.bismarck-mandancvb.org is an imposter.  I looked it up on whois.net, and the registration information is private (i.e., there isn’t any information to be had).  So, being the curious type, I figured I’d check the ol’ Wayback machine at archive.org to see how long this has been going on.

 

There are a lot of snapshots of the website, going back to 1996.  You can imagine what that one looks like – or check it out yourself.  By looking through the various snapshots, it looks like things went off the rails in 2004 – fourteen years ago.  Between June 18th and September 7th, the website was swept up by some generic web search engine thing.  My guess would be that someone forgot to renew the domain or something, and didn’t know how to get it back.

 

Here’s how it looked up until the end.  I actually wrote a blog post about those fantastic winged buffalo.  I don’t have a way of pinpointing when exactly things went sour; just that mid-2004 window.  After that it apparently bounced around a bunch.

 

The current iteration of this site, however, seems to have popped up sometime between October 24th, 2016 and May 12th, 2017.  The theme seems to have been tweaked a little in the past sixteen months, but otherwise it looks the same.

The big question is…why did it take them approximately a year and a half to notice?

Shame on you, KFYR-TV. You should know better.

I was so dismayed to find my former employer handling today’s small plane crash with such amateurish incompetence, I wasn’t even sure how to address it.  Whenever there’s a fatality of any sort, media should take care to give the authorities time to handle notification of loved ones before plastering it all over their pages/airwaves/the net.

I’ve been extremely critical of “those ambulance chasers at KXMB” in the past, but it seems they’ve gotten much better after some personnel and ownership changes over there.  When KFYR-TV was first sold by Meyer Broadcasting, our new employers had an edict on the first page of the new employee handbook that we were not going to engage in sensationalism or irresponsible journalism.  Well, they’re a few owners down the road from those days, but still…

What has me so up in arms?  In the story referenced in the screen shot above, the text of the article on the website even states that authorities are not releasing any information pending notification of family.  Well then, why show the airplane with its N-number clearly visible?

The other local media, KXMB included, used this photo from MCSD.  The tail number is obscured out of respect for the people who are about to get some very awful news from law enforcement.

I have some background in this – I watched an uncle find out about his son’s suicide because the recovery of his body was shown on TV.  There’s no excuse for this sort of thing…a TV news story is gone in minutes, sometimes seconds, without anything to gain from sensationalizing or capitalizing on the grief of others.

Monica and Alan should have known better, especially with their combined experience in this business.  This sort of story requires discretion, and none was shown here.  If it didn’t occur to anyone that they should blurred out or otherwise obscured the tail number of this aircraft, then they can hardly call themselves The News Leader.

The public and family of the deceased pilot deserve an apology for this one.

(UPDATED) Might be time to hop off the sinking MoviePass ship

So, I went to the Grand to see a movie tonight.  I didn’t get to do so.  My plan was to use my MoviePass card; my buddy Dave Ramsey encouraged our family to get a budget on paper, and this month didn’t include any more movies.  Thanks to MoviePass, I went home while the other seven people in our party went in.

The cryptic message above leads me to believe that MoviePass has started to ration how many tickets it’ll allow at any given theater at any given time.  That isn’t the agreement I signed up for in Fall of 2017.  I’ve heard of them doing all kinds of funky stuff lately, from tracking a person’s movements before and after a movie to changing the number of movies a person can see with the subscription.  They’ve gone back and forth on some of these things, but they’re clearly messing with the terms of the service.

 

By the way, I decided to search by the movie (“Solo”, we’re nerds) instead of by theater to see if that would work.  Nope.  And, in fact, the app wouldn’t let me buy a ticket for that movie at the AMC theater across the way (as if I’d want to see a movie in a mall theater anyway, when we’ve got the awesome Grand Theaters).  So there’s clearly another game afoot.  I’d heard rumors that the service was going to selectively choose which movies it’d promote in some markets, presumably as a way to “encourage” the studios to buy-in to working with the service.  Now it’s affecting us here in Bismarck-Mandan.  It looks like I was mistaken on this part: the showings which were not supported were probably 3D, but I checked again the next morning to find that 2D showings were available.  I’d heard that MoviePass had blocked other movies in some markets, and jumped to conclusions.

I was an early adopter of MoviePass in its $9.99 iteration, and an evangelist to boot.  Now, I’m ready to cancel my subscription and advise against signing up for the service.  If you can arrive at a movie, MoviePass in hand, only to find out that it won’t allow you to purchase a ticket, you can end up like me with your evening plans dashed.  I can’t recommend a service like that.

Early on, company CEO Mitch Lowe said that they were targeting people like me, who only see a movie theater 1-3 times a year.  Even if we triple our movie consumption with a MoviePass card, seeing 3-9 movies a year, they come out ahead.  And let’s face it, 9 movies a year worth seeing is giving Hollywood way more credit than they deserve.   But hey, it looked like a decent way to see a movie even if I don’t have any cash in my pocket at the moment, and I could always make sure I see at least a movie a month so I can feel like I’m getting my money’s worth.

Well, that was conditional on the card and app working when I show up at the ticket counter.  Since that’s now a gamble, and our family has a bona fide budget that even Dave Ramsey will be proud of, why don’t I just budget for a movie or two each month and call it good?  Then I won’t have the uncertainty of MoviePass to contend with.

I’ve put in a support request with MoviePass to see if I can get an explanation.  Even so, I think I’m just going to cut out the uncertainty and set aside money for tickets to the movies I anticipate wanting to see.  I’ve looked ahead at the list of upcoming movie releases for 2018, and I can find maybe six movies that I’d rather see on a big screen instead of waiting for Redbox.  Even a couple of those are questionable…why not see them for a lot less money on the 60″ 4K TV in my home, with much more comfort and cheaper concessions?  And I won’t get turned away at the last minute; reserving a Redbox movie doesn’t have to be done within a geofenced area near the machine, and it guarantees I’ll be able to get the movie instead of sulking home empty-handed as I did tonight.

If you’ve been considering a MoviePass subscription, you might want to hold off until they get some more stability.  If you’ve already got one, I hope your experience has been better than mine.  I told every friend I knew about how great the service was when it worked, and even explained that I hadn’t experienced any weird issues that the Internet was buzzing about.  But now, with local proof that the service may not be what it promised, I’m one step away from walking away from it forever.

The big question is, why do these kids hate Jews?

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The mainstream media is talking about this brave uprising of kids who are fed up with violence in their schools, but nobody’s asking who is really pulling the strings on this deal.  The same is true for the Bismarck Tribune, who failed to ask the question: who’s behind all the walkouts?

 

The short answer is:a leftist activist group tied to a number of such events, part of that “community organizing” thing that our previous president was so active in doing.  One of the local students is even listed on that organization’s website, proving that this is no organic, spontaneous, local reaction to a Florida tragedy.  The Women’s March organization is the puppet master.

 

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So what do those people think about America?  Oh, it’s a litany of leftist screeds:

  • America is unfair to people of color;
  • The whole “militarized police” thing we heard during the NODAPL mess;
  • The USA is imperialist.

Yawn.  Name the event, name the issue, it’s like a broken record with these people.  But they’re the ones sending Bismarck High School students out to the sidewalk.  Did you read any of that in the Bismarck Tribune?

 

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So we know what the group behind the BHS students believes, but it gets worse: they’re spotted praising Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, who recently told Chicago that Jews are “satanic”.  Yet he’s the GOAT (“greatest of all time”) according to the co-chair of the Women’s March.  Even the liberal WNYC has to point out that “Half of the board of the Women’s March organization is facing criticism for its alleged alliances with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who delivered a virulently anti-Semitic and bigoted speech in Chicago last month.”

Call me a cynic if you like, but if there was a bunch of pro-life kids that staged a walk-out to oppose the horrors of abortion killing way more children in the womb than guns ever will in the classroom, they’d be asked a lot of tough questions.  They’d be accused of being puppets of some right-wing organization.  If someone associated with someone associated with someone in a pro-life group made offensive or loony comments at a meeting somewhere, the entire group of kids and anyone near them would be associated with those comments.  If there was ANY way to call them Racist™ or connect them to anyone making Racist™ comments, there would be a blitzkrieg to do so. The last thing they’d be called is brave, and nobody would be clamoring for them to get the right to vote so they could overturn that sacred Roe v. Wade decision.

The fact of the matter is, these kids are voicing opinions with which the media agrees.  That makes everything OK, and pay no attention to the man (or in this case, women) behind the curtain. And whatever you do, don’t connect the dots to show the wicked ideologies at play here.

Which leads me back to my original question: why do these kids hate Jews?  If they don’t, maybe they should pick their allegiances more carefully.  If they didn’t know what kind of people they’re aligning with, perhaps they should get more informed before they march out into the streets.

(If you think it’s unfair to attach the anti-semitic comments of Farrakhan to these students, well…welcome to how conservatives are treated.  The media find some tinfoil-hat wacko out on the Internet somewhere, then call up prominent conservatives and demand that they respond to those comments as if they’re associated.  They try to always keep the people they oppose on the defensive.

But in this case, there’s a clear connection between the parties involved.  The kids organized with people who love a career bigot and hateful activist.  They need to be asked about this association.  If they don’t like it, they need to denounce it.  Publicly.)

Blast from North Dakota’s stereoscopic past

It all started when I started going through a box of old toys and things that my mom dropped off at the house.  Most of it was old stuff that was in disrepair or otherwise unusable (such as an old Commodore 64 that I can emulate on my PC), and ended up being discarded.  The two items above, however, caught my eye.  Both eyes, actually.

One of them had a disc in it (they were called “reels”), but I didn’t find any other reels.  One of my favorites as a little kid was one about dinosaurs, and I’d sure love to find that one again for old time’s sake.  But I started thinking about this vintage technology and couldn’t help but wonder…are there any North Dakota-related View-Master reels?

It didn’t take long on eBay before I discovered a set of reels from 1956, and of course I had to have them.

 

This arrived shortly after I fervently clicked Buy It Now – a new, unopened 1956 set of three View-Master slides portraying North Dakota tourist attractions!

 

The pack contained three reels, an insert describing the the photos portrayed, and a couple of order forms for other Sawyer products.  Sawyer invented the View-Master, and is no longer in business.  The company’s View-Master division has traded hands a few times.

 

These are the three reels in their protective sleeves.  Even though the paper package has never been opened, the film slides in the reels have a slight bubbling to them.  I’m guessing they’re some sort of acetate film medium that does this sort of thing after sixty years.

 

The reels are in pretty good shape, although they do have some dust and that sort of thing.  Parts of the reels are slightly bubbled as if they have pimples, and there was some powder in the sleeves, but otherwise they’re totally fine.

Naturally we threw them into a film scanner, although it took some rigging.  Want to see some of my favorites?

 

Here’s the capitol building, long before the Judicial Wing was constructed (or probably even conceived).  I like the water tower on the east side.  Who knew there were trees on the mall, my favorite frisbee spot?

 

Here’s an entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  I may try to find this monument and take a current photo.  A friend of mine recently did that with the tree at the nearby entrance to the campground west of Medora, a tree which appeared in a family photo from his childhood.

 

Here’s a dam photo.  I was just up at the tail race with my kids a week or so ago, and the water was nowhere near this high.  I just looked at the photos from that day and I guess it was closer than I thought, but this is still a high level.  Remember, the dam was only officially completed in the early 1950s and didn’t begin its work as a hydroelectric power plant until 1956 or even 1960, depending on which source you consult.

 

Back to the capitol.  The Pioneer Family monument no longer has the fence around it, and the marble posts are long gone.  I have a postcard of this somewhere as well.  Again, I love the water tower.

 

It wouldn’t be North Dakota without a farming photo or two.  The harvesting equipment of today is significantly larger, and of course there’s the GPS and air conditioning.

 

Here’s another example of things being bigger now: lignite coal mining equipment.  The draglines I’ve done video and photo work on north of here weigh in at up to thirteen million pounds (13,000,000)!  The coal haulers have a 160 ton or greater capacity, too.

 

Here’s the front of the insert.   Click on the photo for a full size (ie, legible) version.

 

And, of course, the back.  Click for the readable size image.

 

And, because I can’t change who I am, I spotted a typo.  I think maybe someone had Fargo on the brain when they wrote the section about “Tiago”.  Hey, at least they didn’t call us South Dakota!

 

I may post some additional images from these reels down the road, we’ll see.  We only scanned one of each image, it might be interesting to take a crack at scanning both.  What am I talking about?  Well, the View-Master is stereoscopic, meaning that the creators of these reels took photos with two cameras spaced slightly apart.  For each image you see, there’s a left one and a right one.  So you get 3D depth perception as you do in real life.  It’s wonderful.  But I currently lack the ambition to scan both perspectives of each of these images and don’t really have a plan for how I’d combine them into a 3D-viewable digital image anyway.

Certainly some of you have enjoyed View-Master reels?  Feel nostalgic yet?