Legalize It, Or: Don't Worry. We're Republicans.

More coverage of those unkempt young radicals and their quest to be hemp farmers.

NY Times: Sober North Dakotans Hope to Legalize Hemp

OK, but how do the stoned North Dakotans feel about it?

Kill Da Wabbit

Everyone from Fox News to the Chronicle of Higher Education is picking up the story about NDSU's aggressive anti-rabbit tactics.

Little Mosque on the Prairie

As seemingly unlikely as Satchel Paige pitching in Bismarck, Ross, N.D., is reported to have been the site of the first mosque in the United States. Voice of America produced an article on it in 2005. Sure, VOA is fairly propagandish and the message here is that "Muslims have long been accepted in America," but interesting nonetheless, especially the revelation that someone named Hassan Abdallah can look like your typical old North Dakota farmer.

North Dakota is Home to First U.S. Mosque

Talking Baseball (Still)

We're still in a baseball mood here.

It's not commonly known, but North Dakota in the 1930s was one of the first places where integrated baseball flourished, thanks in part to ambitious car dealer and team owner, Neil Churchill, who signed some of the best Negro League players of the time. Roger Maris isn't in the Hall of Fame, but Satchel Paige is.

Here's a long article on the state's baseball glory days.

Pronk!

Travis Hafner, AKA Pronk, Sykeston native and Cleveland Indians DH, re-signs for a giant crap-load of money -- $57 million, or 1,000 times the annual economic output of Sykeston. Good for Pronk.

I once tried to figure out an all-North Dakota baseball team. The Maris-Erstad-Hafner part seemed pretty good, but when I realized the starter would be Rick Helling, I kinda lost interest.

Roll Out.

This summer's biggest toy-related blockbuster aimed at 30-year-old men, Transformers, includes actor and Minot native Josh Duhamel. According to his entry on the Internet Movie Database, he owns a restaurant in Minot and is engaged to Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. Not bad, as long as that damn "Humps" song doesn't drive him insane.

Bar-ry! Bar-ry!

Fargo man, Andrew Clapp, puts North Dakota on the map as home to hairy drunk dudes.

Fargo Man Greets Bonds on Field

Barry wasn't afraid, though. "I felt safe with him . . . he had no shoes on. If you come at me one-on-one, you'd better come with a lot, Jack. "

This Just In

North Dakota has no traffic.

Study: Roads better, but deaths, traffic worse

But if you're going 83 mph on I-94, watch out that you don't smash into the little old lady going 45. (No offense, little old ladies.)

Bonus link: The above photo is from a web site that, for some inscrutable reason, collects photos of road signs and includes a North Dakota page. Thanks for your work, road sign afficionado

Proof, I Tell You! Proof!

UFO pilots love rural America.

Alien abduction caught on film in Dickinson, North Dakota

This American Chronicle seems like a reputable source, right? I mean, it's no Coast to Coast AM, but ...

Grr

In case you missed it in Sunday's Forum, Matt Von Pinnon's column about the Fargo-bashing at a Falls Church, Va., graduation. True, the teacher is an ass, but I don't know if publishing his e-mail address is the right approach. Internet etiquette being what it is, are a thousand wrathful e-mails telling him to do who knows what to himself the best way to convince him to reconsider his view of the town?

But the guy sounds like a true ass. Washington, D.C., already has its share of people who think life's winners and losers are apparent by the cars they drive, the people they know or what's on their business cards. Why would a teacher encourage kids to look down on people they don't even know?

Here's a link to the newspaper story Von Pinnon referred to in his column.

John Ydstie

John Ydstie is a host and correspondent at National Public Radio and is a native of Wolford, N.D. Among his NPR pieces are several in which he reflects on his upbringing in North Dakota. One of the best was about playing in the finals of the Class B basketball tournament for his high school, a good evokation of the state's smallest towns and the spotlight of Class B sports.

A Big Ballgame for a Small Town

Our Favourite Classical Liberal Magazine ...

... takes note of the pro-hemp movement in North Dakota. Maybe the first Economist article to reference both "Pimp My Ride" and BioWillie (though records are lacking).

On a High: Is Hemp the New Green?

Tu Stultus Es

Ahh, the Onion:

Addressing Climate Change, Bush Calls for Development of National Air Conditioner

A Different Conrad

Not Kent, but ex-Canadian and erstwhile media mogul Conrad Black is on trial in Chicago for allegedly using his publicly held company as a personal expense account and in general being a weasel. Part of the evidence against him is the millions of bucks he directed to himself through questionable non-compete agreements in the sale of his media holdings, including the Jamestown Sun.

Trial account in the Toronto Globe and Mail. The Jamestown mention is about two-thirds into the article.

Hooray for Energy!

A blog from the National Association of Manufacturers ("The business of America is business," according to Coolidge) visits North Dakota and says the state's healthy attitude toward the energy industry can help reverse outmigration. It's true that with gas prices above $3 oil companies will want to explore new sources, but it would nice for the state to develop through a less volatile industry. It probably looked like the sky was the limit for the oil industry in Williston around 1979. But that didn't last long.

Goodbye, Bismarck, and Thanks for All That Energy

Nice headline, though.

What, no Judy's Tavern?

Something old, from 2006: The New York Times tells us what to do for 36 hours in Grand Forks. Seems about right, but I think they could've cheated a little and included Whitey's, even if it is in EGF.

The author, upon investigation, is a Twin Cities freelancer who also wrote a book about Northern League baseball called "Slouching Toward Fargo." Might be an OK read.

My only quibble is the sentence that says the Red "would have destroyed the city were it not for the legions of hyperorganized volunteer sandbaggers." Having been one of those (terribly unorganized) sandbaggers in 1997, I don't know what the river could have done that it didn't actually do. Those sandbags didn't make much difference when the town was under water.

Huh?

Here's an article in the Stars and Stripes about an airman in Okinawa who gets caught ripping off his buddies' packages at the post office. But then there's this weird non sequitur near the end of the story. Are they saying North Dakota makes people want to smoke pot? Was that really relevant to the story? Was it to make the point that he's a dumbass?

Stop the Presses

America's Next Top Model CariDee English (Fargo's own) takes on the heartbreak of psoriasis.

Press release about the National Psoriasis Foundation

OK, so some people become knee-jerk, um, jerks whenever beautiful model types adopt Important Causes. Sorry for the sarcasm. Kudos to CariDee for her efforts.

Happy Birthday, Louise Erdrich

Belated. Gary sends his regards via "The Writer's Almanac."

The link opens a RealAudio file of the program. Here's a link to the text.

(I'll try to get less Public Radio-oriented here. Rob the Say Anything Guy might start fingering me as a mouthpiece of the left.)

Camp Snoopy

Another NPR story, this one not so heartwarming: hepatitis, meth and inmates' nickname for the joint on the outskirts of Bismarck.

North Dakota Tackles Hepatitis C in Prisons

Note

I've enabled the blog-o-matic to accept anonymous comments, so all of you who have not posted your thoughts on the controversial, hot button topics addressed here for fear of retaliation, you may now do so.

But please, no jackassery.

Some Old Stuff

If you're a liberal elitist like me, you love the hell outta the National Public Radio, maybe while driving your hybrid car to a wine tasting or a protesting.

NPR has a nice, homey feature called StoryCorps, in which people interview their grandmas and talk about all sorts of touching stuff. From the archives, here are some North Dakotans telling stories about their childhoods. I like stories.

When Hard Labor Taught a Lesson

Keeping Time Across the Ages

We're Cheap

Bite it, Iowa!

AAA rates N.D. (and Nebraska) as cheapest destinations

KC Speaks

Conrad takes issue with coverage of the Democrats' budget proposal. It's not about assumptions of the expiration of upper-class tax cuts. It's about the tax gap, off-shore tax havens and abusive tax shelters. Got that?

Conrad writes a letter to the NY Times

North Country Memorial Day

Today's Washington Post has an article about families of Minnesota National Guard soldiers, who are on one of the longest deployments in Iraq. It's mostly about Minnesota, but also about the Red River Valley, with some North Dakota references. It's also a good read for Memorial Day.

Long Time Gone, from the WaPo

Nice Forks Joke

Bored Chicago columnist, eager to get out of the office for Memorial Day weekend, picks on North Dakota. At least someone is gauging America's North Dakota awareness. Apparently, it ain't too good, either.

The Black Hills are not in North Dakota.

From Kent to Byron

Against the 400,000 ...

Byron Dorgan got some press opposing the immigration bill's guest worker provision.

"Who is the senator from North Dakota trying to fool?"

Maybe the guest workers would like to move to North Dakota and take advantage of the state's low unemployment and cost of living. It wouldn't be the first time a wave of immigrants came and populated the open prairie.

Is Not/Is So

Sen. Kent Conrad: Expiration of tax cuts in 2010 is not a tax increase.

Conservative columnist Robert Novak: Yes, it is.

Novak accuses Kent of a "big lie."

'Cause there's no argument like a semantic argument.

Another NY Times Obit for a North Dakotan ...

... whom I'd never heard of.

Myer Shark, 94, not a fan of the utilities

If your name is Shark, are you destined to become an attorney?

Cuba y Dakota del Norte

El Roge is talking Cuba again, this time in the Miami Herald. (It's a short quote, halfway down).

Cuba trade goes on

C'mon ... Let 'em have our agricultural products. They can't live on cigars alone.

Go West

Reporter in Oregon, raised in North Dakota, needs directions to the ocean.

Tell Terry where to go

Prairie Dogged

Sardonic Washington gossip blog Wonkette details Sen. Dorgan's fear and loathing of prairie dogs. I have to disagree with Byron on this. Prairie dogs are awesome.

Dorgan: North Dakota is going to the dogs

I'm willing to give the senator the benefit of the doubt here and assume that with the vast amount of rhetorical crud congressmen have to produce over serval terms their oratory sorta drifts off to weirder areas at times. But note how the comments after the Wonkette post show the internet's ability to reduce dialogue to general jackassery.

Rob at Say Anything also covered Dorgan's jihad against prairie dogs, though didn't link to Wonkette.

Tsk, Tsk

What's the guy supposed to do with a snowmobile in Alabama, anyway?

Eyesore in Alabama

Synfuels ...

... and, um, elephant poop. I guess even the most worthless seeming crap is good for something.

Synfuels plant now a "crown jewel"

The other one has the whiff of a hoax. Five hundred pounds a day ... wow!

Elephant scat

"Not a Single Hint of Human Endeavor"

Guy writes a book about parks in the Midwest and names Theodore Roosevelt as his favorite. His book doesn't include Yellowstone or anything like that, but we beat out South Dakota at least. Take that, Badlands National Park.

TR National Park best in Midwest

Town For Sale

This story was all over the wires today. It's a good story, too, as much about a 93-year-old woman (who seems like a hoot) as it is about a small town. By Blake Nicholson of the AP, here is how it appeared in the Washington Post. (Nice work, Blake.)

Toots Hagglund, Founding Mother

Just Like So Many College Grads ...

... Bees are fleeing North Dakota.

Bye-Bye Bees

Interesting revelations:

1) North Dakota has an apiary inspector.

2) North Dakota leads the country in honey production.

3) Hive husbandry is slipping.

Legalize It

"Squeaky clean" North Dakota farmer loves hemp -- for rope, cloth, livestock feed and all that -- and brings the word to Vermont. But alas, every time he plant a seed, they say kill it before it grow.

N.D. hemp advocate in Vermont

Even More Remembering the Flood (Cont.)

Chicago Tribune editorial: Norwegians in North Dakota are stoic. The rest of you should stop whining, too.

ChiTrib on the "whine-free life"

Tractor

For some reason, this story set off alarm bells in the heads of wire editors across the country, perhaps confirming long-held suspicions. Here it is in the Washington Post:

N.D. Senior Goes to Prom in Tractor

Slow News Day

Not much new today, so we'll go back to 2003 for maybe my all-time favorite Onion news article.

North Dakota Found To Be Harboring Nuclear Missiles

And then's another article on the state's new incorporation rules. Strap yourselves in, it's one exciting story.

Reuters: "Don't expect a rush of large companies to the sparsely populated state."

The Writer and the Mascot

I acknowledge that this isn't exactly a national news event, but it gets to the (poorly stated) point of this site: How does the rest of the world view our generally unknown state?

Louise Erdrich and the Fighting Sioux athletes are people we should want North Dakota associated with -- talented folks who excel in the top ranks of their chosen fields, in this case, literature and college sports. It'd just be nice if we could have the one while avoiding being thought of as stubbornly resistant to giving up our offensive imagery.

Author Erdrich rejects UND honors

("Sure," you say, "but how many hockey trophies has Louise Erdrich won?" But still ...)

Wonkette Is Snarky

This site always kinda bugged me, to be honest. Here it makes the trenchant observation that North Dakota is cold (and that state legislatures can make oddball laws).

D.C. gossip blog on anti-microchip bill

More Remembering the Flood

It's all about the hardiness. Or something like that. The Chicago Tribune calls some people in Grand Forks to talk about the flood. That Mike Jacobs stays awful busy with this stuff.

Grand Forks in ChiTrib

Look Out, Delaware!

The Economist lauds North Dakota's new incorporation laws. The writer also followed the no-one-knows-anything-about-North-Dakota-but-bad-weather theme. God knows, Delaware's lax incoporation laws have helped that state burn brightly in the world's imagination, so maybe this will help.

"Look Marge, I'm reading the Economist! Did you know Indonesia is at a crossroads?"

The Big Flood, 10 Years Later

As reported by Weekend Edition. Includes a good slideshow of Grand Forks then and now, interviews with Mike Jacobs, Pat Owens and others. Perhaps NPR music director and Grand Forks native Ned Wharton helped steer NPR's attention to the anniversary. Or maybe it's just a good story.

Looking back on '97

Prof. Farmer

Fred Kirschenmann, an N.D. farmer, Iowa State prof and organic food guy appears on the Splendid Table, a public radio show about fancy cookin', and talks about farming from a more high-brow perspective than, say, Al Gustin. Not that we have anything against Al.

Public radio, down on the farm

Good Words for Grand Forks

The album, not the town. N.D. native Tom Brosseau gets mentions in the NY Times and on NPR. He's not just for KFJM anymore.

New York Times article

NPR piece

www.tombrosseau.com

Pork, Pols, Pomeroy, and -- oh, yeah -- that war.

Washington Post article on all the add-on projects in the war funding bill. Sensible quotes from Rep. Earl and, in what may be his WaPo debut, Jack Dalrymple. Not bad for a lt. gov., Jack.

War: bad. Earmarks: well ... maybe.

Both Sides Now

North Dakota's proposed "trigger law" banning all abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned meets with joyous/wrathful praise/condemnation by people who are really concerned by the issue.

Abortion law hooray!

Abortion law boo!

More Klosterman, Onion AV Club

Brief mention of UND about halfway through. The rest is the usual pop culture absurdity.

Klosterman in Onion's "Random Rules"

Thomas Kleppe, 87

Notable North Dakotan I've never heard of passes. Before my time, or more accurately, having served under Ford, right of the time of my birth. The Washington Post has a presumably canned obit befitting a 1970s D.C. official. The Bismarck Tribune has a short obit, but seemingly netted a quote from G.H.W. Bush (there's no wire attribution, anyway). Nice going, Virginia Grantier!

Obit in Sunday's Post

Bismarck Tribune obit

Roger Johnson: Our Man In Havana

North Dakota continues its flirtation with Communism. What's next a state-owned mill and elevator?

Roger Johnson goes to Cuba