Jim Shaw wrote a column for ForumComm titled “We shouldn’t be afraid to shop, worship or go to school.” Shaw has issues with the high level of gun violence in our country, Donald Trump, and he speaks for millions of sentient Americans. ForumComm hack Rob Port couldn’t have that. Evidently unable to see beyond his yard in Minot, N.D., Port …
The flower garden at University Park in Grand Forks is in full splendor as these images from photographer Dave Bruner prove out.
Well, Wylie Bice gets to keep his bridge. And he won’t be going to the pokey. If you’ve got enough money out there in the oil patch, you can get away with pretty much anything. If you’ve been following this story, you know that Bice is the guy who put a big concrete bridge over the Little Missouri State Scenic …
Okra isn’t a vegetable kids who grew up in northern Minnesota would hear much about in their formative years. In fact, many of them probably never had an inkling about the flowering plant in the mallow family. I can attest to that. My first exposure to the plant known in many English-speaking countries as ladies’ fingers or ochro was probably in the …
In the year 2000, the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush into the presidency and it blew the call in multiple ways. Bush was/is an intellectual wisp in his own family, a lazy POTUS and easily manipulated by sociopathic jamokes like Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Roger Ailes and Dick Cheney. When the Supremes stopped the count and the bizarre chad …
One of the things to see on photographer Dave Bruner’s bucket list was the Fairview Bridge and Cartwright Tunnel. Located near Cartwright, N.D., and east of Fairview, Mont., the bridge was built by Gerrick & Gerrick of Steele, N.D., for the Great Northern Railroad as part of a plan for its never completed Montana Eastern Railway. Unused since 1986, the bridge’s …
I’m awake before dawn this morning at Red Oak House with a long task list that includes an overdue Garden Notes post. Between painting the house, ailing elderly parents, a trip to Yellowstone and preparations for my upcoming adventure, I have fallen behind in my writing. Yet, I write for pleasure and have no deadline, so it is “all good.” …
Well, we watched our right-wing terror network working out some frustration in El Paso, Texas, plus the American terrorists currently listed as agnostic that shot up Gilroy, Calif., Dayton, Ohio, and those coming soon to your neck of the woods. And that was on top of our regular body count. Flags were lowered. The usual suspects drew their swords in …
So here comes my favorite week of the year. It’s the 18th time I head to Montana and Idaho for the Lewis and Clark Cultural Tour through the White Cliffs of the Missouri River east of Fort Benton and up on the Lolo Trail west of Missoula. I made a list Monday of the number of times on the nine-day …
Pesto is often associated with pasta. So it stands to reason that the basil-based sauce would be a nice fit for chicken noodle soup or the like. I recently came across the following recipe, which was adapted from one in “Better Homes and Gardens Quick Homemade: Fast, Fresh Meals in 30 Minutes” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). It’s not your mother’s …
It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Minnesota lake country paradise. And in that paradise live many different types of birds. Grand Forks photographer Michael Bogert recently captured these images of just a few of them.
Photographer Eric Bergeson captured the beauty of summer this week at Bergeson Nursery near Fertile, Minn. The nursery’s gardens are always open during daylight hours in the summer and are the most beautiful from late July through early September, as these images prove out.
A guest blog by my daughter, photographer Chelsea Sorenson, “Wild By Nature Photography,” including a small selection of the thousands of photographs she took on our visit to Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks last week. Last Christmas, I asked my mom to take me to Yellowstone National Park for my upcoming vacation because when you’re a kid, being “dragged around” …
Soon after his impossibly fat pitch got hit into the center-field stands by the former director of the CIA, Kelly Armstrong found himself talking to NBC’s Chuck Todd. He was near giddy. Kelly figures war hero Bob pulled a fast one with his special council report and he can’t wait to tell skeptical Chuck. Baghdad Bobby Barr isn’t even spinning …
Where will it end? I understand taking down statues of Confederate generals, especially those put up during the Civil Rights Movement to reassert white Southern pride and a grim determination to perpetuate Jim Crow as long as possible. I can even understand taking down statues of Robert E. Lee, though I personally have always seen him as a tragic figure, …
Fargo Post 2 shut out the Grand Forks Royals 7-0 in the championship game of the North Dakota American Legion AA tournament Tuesday afternoon at Kraft Memorial Field in Grand Fork. (Check out more photos from Russ Hons here.)
“This isn’t about political affiliation,” Congressman Kelly Armstrong told Chuck Todd with a straight face after A-Stro questioned Robert Mueller’s military hero grade integrity in front of a national audience. The Cult Commissioner told Kelly to “hit the old man in the face with a dead squid.” The live ones can get unruly and might swallow a cat. So he …
One of the great joys of cooking is preparing food with fresh herbs and vegetables straight from the garden. Making pesto is one such experience that I relish. It’s also one that holds great appeal to Kim Holmes. Kim, longtime owner of Sanders 1907 in downtown Grand Forks who retired in 2017, told me making pesto was one of his …
Spoiler Alert: If you find Rob Port repugnant, have no interest in his antics or have just eaten, keep scrolling. I think my bizarre hobby is informative to some people who want to know what’s going on with a far right-wing propagandist in our midst but wouldn’t actually read a Port column with a 10-foot microscope. Lately, Rob Port has …
Richard Nixon said it was the “greatest week in the history of the world since the creation.” My parents and my sister and I sat in our den (there were dens then) and watched the entire thing in grainy flickering black and white on our big console color TV. I took a hundred 35mm black-and-white photos of the television screen. …
Theodore Roosevelt National Park and environs around Medora in the North Dakota Badlands can offer some pretty spectacular viewing during the summer months, and these images from Grand Forks photographer Russ Hons provide the proof. (Check out more photos from Russ Hons here.)
I’m even praying for this next sentence to be true. Except for the obvious exceptions, every person in the country knows that they’ve always been free to leave, and none of us need a cowardly lying racist to shoot his mouth off with reminders. And the president isn’t the arbiter of who loves this country, anyway. He can’t even choose …
I was in grade school living in El Paso, where my father was a drill sergeant at Fort Bliss, the summer of the moon landing and walk, 50 years ago. Fifty years! Like most everyone else, we avidly watched the TV coverage, on a little black-0and-white TV in our living room. Life magazine was always on our coffee table, with …
I was getting toward the end of my long walk on a typically scorching Texas morning when I approached a road construction site. I passed a Hispanic man standing in the bed of a pickup. “Amigo!” he said. I assumed he was speaking to a co-worker and I kept walking. Then he called out again. “Amigo!” When I turned, he …
When it comes to meat sauces for pasta, just about everyone has their favorite. Spaghetti lovers generally prefer a sauce that contains ground beef and Italian sausage. Some people even like to add ribs to the mix. Ragu is also a popular choice, both the Bolognese (finely chopped ground beef, veal or pork) or Neapolitan (chunky beef or pork taken …
Neil Armstrong took one giant step onto the moon on Mom’s birthday in 1969. She took one small step onto the noggins of stratified thinkers about three years later. It was an era of ritualized nonsense in high schools. Didn’t tuck your shirt after gym, the last class of the day? Some assistant principal who spent the Korean War pushing …
The last time I wrote to all of you I was about to embark on my John Steinbeck Jr. camper truck journey in Colorado. I had no idea what to expect. The rig I rented in Denver was really designed for back country exploring — heavy tires, a very powerful engine, shovels and other equipment latched to the side and …
Hot off the press, from the president who gives racist conmen a bad name: “IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE, YOU CAN LEAVE! It is your choice, and your choice alone. This is about love for America. Certain people HATE our Country …” This is one of those big lies you hear about since nobody in this country hates America …
Colorado photographer Jeff Olson recently traveled to the capital of Utah, Salt Lake City, where he took in the many sites of the downtown area.
Picnic season is in full swing in the Midwest with the dog days of summer and its hot and sultry weather blanketing the area. And there’s nothing better to serve friends and family on those steamy days than a cold salad to go with what’s cooking on the barbecue grill. There are many good cold salad recipes floating around the internet …
I’m not quite sure what to think of this young fellow named Josh Gallion, North Dakota’s elected state auditor. But two newspaper articles about him in the last couple of days got me to chuckling a little bit. The first was Mike Jacobs’ column in Tuesday’s Grand Forks Herald about the recent history of the state auditor’s office. Gallion’s election …
Grand Forks photographer Russ Hons traveled last weekend to Greenbush, Minn., to catch the action of the Wojo Rodeo and as usual, came up with some pretty spectacular shots. (Check out more photos from Russ Hons here.)
ICYMI: Our president willingly offers up the 73rd clue for historians to ponder regarding his emigration. “Fake news. You don’t have this problem with Russia, we have. You don’t have it.” That was Donald “Forest Expert” Trump amiably chatting up Vladimir “The Impaler” Putin for the microphones and sounding too sadly envious — for my taste — in his despair of not …
The grade school teacher would hand you a yellow-sleeved envelope containing your final report card each spring during our grueling 1960s public education in the Red River Valley. She would gleam and wish you a fine summer, then gallop like Secretariat toward any saloon, pool hall or campsite where children were not allowed. On the back of the report card …
Well, I did it. I painted Red Oak House, including two doors and some trim. It is the first (and I’ll bet last) house I’ve painted. It is a very big house, with two extremely tall sides. We should have rented scaffolding, but Jim held the tall ladder when I reached to the very tops and there were no major …
If you weren’t able to attend Thursday night’s Fourth of July fireworks display in Grand Forks, let photographer Russ Hons show you some of what you missed. (Check out more photos from Russ Hons here.)
After President Trump’s slightly soggy Fourth of July “Salute to America” speech Thursday on the Washington Mall, a Facebook friend writes, “THE GREATEST SPEECH EVER MADE BY A SITTING PRESIDENT!!!” (Capitalization and exclamation points not added.) So, I guess for some “The Gettysburg Address” will ring a little flat from now on. And you know what that means, don’t you? …
The thought of homemade pie conjures up warm memories of good times past for many people who grew up on farms or in the small towns that dot a map of the Plains and Midwest. During the summer, I could usually count on finding a pie, often rhubarb, on the counter at our house or Grandma and Grandpa Menard’s almost every …
After all of that snow and good spring rains, the gardens are lush at Red Oak House. Jim finally got the rabbit-proof fence perfected so the vegetable beds are going to produce bountifully. We are eating lettuce and radishes and the peas are just around the corner. The weeds are flourishing, too, and we barely keep up with that chore. …
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., second chair apologist for sexual predators, proposed a bill that would restrict federal funding for health care facilities that “don’t respect human life and patient rights.” Cramer gives no mention of the evil human rights abuses that President Trump has inflicted on brown children, who are unfortunately dependent on his care since the orange stain was …
Grand Forks photographer Michael Bogert recently hiked into Big Bog Lake in Lake Bemidji State Park, following a winding boardwalk through a spruce/tamarack bog, on the way viewing pitcher plants, sundews, orchids and other plants.
John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” might be the most aching, life-ain’t-fair western film. Told in long flashback, it ends with a newsman trashing the notes from an interview that revealed who really pinged an ornery outlaw. “You’re not going to use the story?” asks Jimmy Stewart’s tired, flawed hero. The newsman explains, “This is the West. When …
Most hotdishes or casseroles are perfect for those working folks who don’t have all day to prepare a meal — or those who are just looking for a something that is quick and tasty to put on the table for supper. As a retiree, I usually have a lot of free time, so it doesn’t matter if it takes an …
It’s time for the citizens of Fargo to wake up. Stories about crime, accidents, apartment overload, license without accountability are rampant. Years ago, Fargo attorney Mark Friese issued a stern warning to the Fargo City Commission, the mayor and its administrator, Pat Zavoral. It was at a time when as usual, political know-it-alls were concerned about money going to the …