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I used to work for Blue Cross of North Dakota and met president Mike Unhjem a few times, but an unexpecting homeowner met the person in charge of his health insurance last night when the drunk Unhjem broke into his home. Unhjem, when discovered, took off in a vehicle, and was promptly captured by police -- all allegedly, of course. If I remember right, Unhjem had quit drinking and gone through AA years ago; it seems he's got some more work to do.
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The Fargo Bookmobile is done; the library cites the addition of branch libraries as the reason for the change, but no doubt a lot of people are shocked by the change. Granted, I've never been that impressed with the Fargo library (it doesn't feel bigger or fuller than ones I've seen in towns of 10,000 people), but I worry that the bookmobile was less of a book-delivering service, and more of a outreach program to remind people that the library exists. Without it, will there be enough reminders for adults and children who already need a 'push' to go to the library?
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26 2006 0 comments |
The children were up and thumping around upstairs, just shy of what we call The Ow Game. The Ow Game, forbidden in the house, is played by deliberately causing pain to another gameplayer, after which everyone laughs, then the next player causes pain to the other player, and so forth until the parents get mad. This morning's game sounded like it could shortly become the Ow Game, but wise children were avoiding the most important part of gameplay (the loud "OW!") and were simply wrestling around violently.
Half-awake, I scrambled around the pile of papers on the table to find the electric disconnect notice. At the beginning of February, we recieved a $800 electric bill: in December they apparently either misread the meter, estimated the meter (which they've done in the past with similar results) or simply missed billing us once, causing a large bill only two or three weeks after the previous bill, and only a few weeks before the next bill. In five weeks, our electric bill balance went from zero to $1,200, making us scramble a bit to catch up. The disconnect notice is automatically generated, despite our intent to pay things off soon. The notice gave us until the end of the month, so I doubted it was the cause, but thought it best to have it in-hand when talking to the electric company. Continue reading…
The peregrine falcons are back! Downtown Fargo has had a couple of falcons that return every year named Dakota Ace and Frieda -- one year I saw one sitting along 10th street south during rush hour, in a big area of blood-stained snow, disemboweling a pigeon. Now that's a downtown bird you don't mess with.
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North Dakota Colleges bring in more new students than leave for college -- NDSU, in Fargo, is one of the biggest of them. This means that, compared to the 'brain drain' which asserts that our youth are leaving the state in droves, there's more 19-year-old college freshmen in Fargo than there were 18-year-old high-school seniors the previous year. I find it promising, even though keeping them after they graduate college is going to be tougher than getting them to come in the first place.
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The Princess of Norway will be visiting Fargo in April. Part of me, upon hearing that headline, wonders how a 19th-century transatlantic paddle-wheel steamship will make it up the Red, but apparently Norway still does have a royal family, of whom the most princessly and literary of the bunch will be in town to read from her children's book, and will no doubt partake of our American-Norwegian amenities. More details on the tour are found at her publisher's website.
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16 2006 0 comments |
The book is Decomposition, by J Eric Miller, with an epilogue by Susannah Breslin that started out as a foreword, but the book is rather iconoclastic so things just didn't end up that way. It's a story of a young woman who, having killed her emotionally distant boyfriend, tosses his body in the trunk and hits the road to find the good ex-boyfriend that always treated her right. The book is rather short, barely 110 pages, which makes for easy reading. Miller has been a short-story writer for quite a while, producing a critically acclaimed book Animal Rights and Pornography and teaching writing in Colorado. If you're near Augusta State University, he's speaking at the Sandhills Writers Conference, whose horrible, horrible website tells you nothing, so he could be speaking tonight, or tomorrow, or Saturday.
And, just a recap of other books we've got out: The Suburban Diva: From the Real Side of the Picket Fence has sold a couple hundred copies in its first month of availability, which is our biggest seller so far and a nice start for a fledgling publisher. We've heard rumours that a fan took it to New York to hang out outside the windows of a network morning show, and managed to get a copy to one of the anchors. W00t!
In our erotica genre of books, Jude Mason's Dance of Submission isn't selling as fast as we'd like, but the readers of BDSM slavery erotica are fewer and further between than one might think.
And, I suppose I never have mentioned our reprints: we've only got two out at the moment, Famous Hussies of History and The Masculine Cross. Hussies is a collection of short autobiographies of influential historical women, written wittily (originally for a magazine) by the author of the Lad collie books. Masculine Cross is a pantheistic analysis of the Cross across religions, and the inevitable (yet sometimes specious) realization that the cross is phallic in nature, sometimes funny, but sometimes eye-opening.
Oh, wait -- this is a blog -- I gotta throw in some self-aggrandizing comments. First of all, every book is electronically typeset by me, and all the covers are designed by me (even if I didn't create the original art). Unlike a lot of reprints, who are essentially photocopies of the original pages, I convert the scanned pages to computer text, which creates crisper, easier-to-read text and allows us to change book size & number of pages without affecting the text itself. The original books, of course, come to me as email attachments from the editors, to which I add page size, margins, page numbers, running headers and footers, and all the trappings of the book world.
Typesetting is a more involved project than you might think: When you open Word or Works and start typing a long document, the computer just lets you type, on and on and on, maybe making it look like you've rolled across onto another page as you typed, when in fact you're just typing a long string of text on a page. You're not concerned about where things actually fall on the page because you trust the computer to handle that for you, and when you hit 'print,' it comes out on paper and doesn't run over the edges and is big enough to read, so you're happy. Typesetting for a book involves imagining what this long string of text in the computer will look like when chopped up into little 30-line chunks, approximately 60 characters in each line, and spread out on the fronts and backs of facing pages. It's a rather foreign concept from a computer standpoint (backs of pages? can you print on those?), but I'm getting the hand of it, along with research and reading that's given me a number of tips.
So, we're an official publisher now: go search for my name in the Library of Congress database under "Command Keyword" -- I've got four entries already! We've got books being sold all over, in college bookstores and online, maybe in the hands of Good Morning America, and we're hoping this keeps up. We're eventually aiming for a book every two weeks...we'll see if we can get there by the end of the year.
Guess what state had the greatest rate of wage increase? North Dakota did. Now, we could get into the semantics of what this means: the larger rate doesn't necessarily mean the better end result, but in terms of improving wages versus inflation this is a boon to the state, who has problems keeping employees in the first place. Let's see 2006 as the year wages go on an increasing run, and home valuation takes a dive. This'll be scary for the people who took out an insane $200,000 loan on a poorly-built home in the Sprawl, but if you're making more money put more thought into your financial planning and get the most out of the raise. However, in terms of bringing wage-earners into the economy and/or reducing welfare, high wage-vs-housing ratio is much, much better for everybody.
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While it's not exactly the water I drink every day ('round here we get water from the river), the rest of Cass County wins for having the tastiest water. Tastiest, compared to other rural water systems -- which, no doubt, are pretty tasty too, if you look at the water that comes out of pipes, overall. It can't be worse than the stuff you pay for in bottles. Next stop: Washington! Last year, they actually did pretty good in the nationals. We should hold a pep rally before the water heads off to competition.
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3 2006 1 comment |
Thanks to the friendly people at Google, you won't trash my server's bandwidth by downloading the film. If the video below is too 'jumpy,' I'd recommend downloading it directly from Google - make sure you have Google Video Player installed though (it's easy). You can turn down the music if you like, as it was added by me: the original film is silent.
I immediately recognized the setting of this parade -- the block looks almost identical today, seventy years later. The buildings seen across the street, behind the paraders and revelers, is the 500 block of North Broadway, the short block between St Mary's Cathedral and the Great Northern railroad tracks.
At the South end, closest the camera, is an IGA store -- Fargo records show the building was built by H Idelkope, but the younger of you will recognize it as Duane Johnson Bookseller's building. I often rode my bike there to buy comics in the 1980s, and it is still a bookstore today even though Duane no longer runs it. There's two small shops just north of the IGA (both are still there, but I believe are unoccupied), and the two-story building with the brick stripes across the top is the Aggie Block -- from my childhood, it was Lantern Comics, who moved into the Aggie when the building they occupied across the street was razed to 'improve' the area by building an ugly strip mall that's 90% unoccupied today. The Aggie Block was refitted a few years back, just before the current explosion of Broadway improvements, and gained a lot of attention because it looked like the original building. As you can see, the front of the building hasn't changed in seventy years. The retail space is actually available right now, since Lantern closed last year, if you're looking. Since the building was built in 1926, it helps date the film.
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Well, Fargo was projected on the Radisson as planned -- and MPR as a nice article, with photos and interviews, including a silly photo depicting somebody interviewing a statue of Frances McDormand. Me? I didn't see it. I had to be at work by 6:30am, so I was in bed pretty early. And it was cold. And snowing. And we had blueberry pie.
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While we're not all that backwards around here, having running water and indoor lavatories and all, sometimes we show our colors just a little - like when a French camera crew and a Hawaiian model show up in town. They stopped in Fargo to take rustic pictures for the MarlboroClassics catalog (request one!) in Bonanzaville, and then moved on to real rustic in Enderlin. Finding things not quite as rustic as they'd like, they had the model dirty up her boots, hung up an antelope head and a flyswatter, and went just that little more grungier. Ah, picturesque North Dakota!
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