KELOLAND.com Blogs

While all of us can sympathize with Senator Tim Johnson’s plight I have mixed feelings about his decision not to debate his opponent.  Mixed because in recent times, debates haven’t amounted to much more than the reiteration of all the soundbites the candidates say they regret having to campaign with.  I know.  I was often the guy trying to move things beyond that. 

On the other hand, these debates…often too many of them…are really the only time voters can actually compare the candidates’ stands on the issues and get a fix on their charisma at all, and charisma is certainly a part of politics. 

Bill Janklow had a rough form of it that convinced people his way was the only way.  Tom Daschle’s charisma manifested itself as everybody’s paperboy regretting that he has to collect for the papers he’s been delivering. 

Larry Pressler must have had some kind of elusive charisma, maybe everybody’s booksmart grandson.  It worked for 22 years, virtually unchallenged. 

Tim Johnson was never much on charisma, just a pretty good roads and bridges congressman in the senate who is more like a traditional, moderate Republican than most of the current batch of right wingers who are more concerned with how we live our individual lives than how they run the country.  South Dakotans don’t demand much of their leaders. 

Johnson’s convenient, but logical decision, not to get into the ring with Republican challenger Joel Dystra really screws the voters out of the only opportunity they had to judge the candidates besides the now-traditional multi-million dollar barrage of commercials.  Sure, there will be meetings with editorial boards, many of whom have already made up their minds anyway.  But it’s not the same thing as seeing or hearing the candidates at least pretend to duke it out live on television or radio.  Each of these interviews reaches only a small slice of the voters leaving the candidates with the ability to say one thing in one place and the complete opposite someplace else.  You already see it in the presidential campaign on both sides. 

I don’t know what the answer is but there has to be a better answer than: “No debates.”  Maybe separate, but equal interviews would work.  I’ve never put much stock in capitol debates, but a candidate certainly has to communicate with the homefolks on their terms once in a while. 

The question each voter will have to decide here, suddenly, is not whether Johnson is competent but whether he is somehow taking advantage of his own bad situation. 

Judging by his voice over about “supporting this message” on his latest commercials, his speech isn’t making much progress and it may even have gone backwards a tad.  It’s not a taste that he is wise to leave in the voters’ mouth.  If his opponants are too kind, or too chicken to say it, I will.  This is the U.S Senate we're talking about; two per state, one hundred princes of government in the whole country among 300 million of us.  This is the big leagues.  

I'm not looking for the job.  Anybody else is welcome to it, but maybe we need a statewide forum like First Monday where the candidates' backers can duke it out.  Do you realize we haven't done that program since John beat Thune, or was it when Thune beat Daschle?  Seems like yesterday, doesn't it?

I’m refreshed.  I’ve had my mostly monthly, caffeine driven meeting of the Society of Jesuits and Journalists…that would be my friends Dave Kranz and Jimmy The Priest and me.  Appropriately, we usually hold it at Minerva’s, the restaurant that shares its name with the Roman goddess of practically everything; notably wisdom, war, poetry, medicine, commerce, crafts and the invention of music, from the Lute to the Victrola to the IPod.   In Greece, she was Athena, but we don’t have a restaurant named Athena’s, so…

When acquaintances like the mayor or Jim Woster (You remember him from KELO.  He’s looking really old) drop over to wonder what a priest is doing with the likes of Kranz and me, we just point out that we’re the reason he has a job. 

These meetings are unrecorded because most of what we talk about is hearsay, heresy, speculation, and outright slander; something like the Algonquin Round Table with the likes of Dorothy Parker. 

One of the things on our agenda this time was Princess Stephanie’s new reelection signs with Stephanie in large print and Herseth-Sandlin in squinty print.  She is running for reelection to congress with possible aspirations of running for governor in a couple of years.  I opined that Princess Stephanie from the tiny, obscure principality of Herseth in the far Northeast, since she is expecting, might run on a Madonna and Child ticket, since the pundits (us) think she can have any office she wants, short of sainthood.  After some lively discussion, Jimmy The Priest moved that we table that one.  I also wondered if Prince Sandlin of the larger principality of Texas would walk a couple of steps behind her, like Queen Elizabeth and…and…what’s his name, the one who came from Greece, Athena’s home, when it was a monarchy thinking he would be King of England.  I don't know.  The dutchy of Herseth has had better political longevity with queens than kings. 

We no sooner get through this and several other items on the napkin agenda when Woster pops back over, telling us that his lawyer/friend’s credit card has been rejected and wondering if one of us has a twenty.  We all plead vows of poverty.   Had I known that Minerva was the goddess of commerce I’d have told him to put the arm on her, maybe telling her a couple of long jokes to soften her up, like he does when he makes a speech. 

Kranz is the head of the Jesuits and Journalists Society, which means he decides when we meet since he’s the only one of us that has a real job.  None of it amounts to anything, hardly worth the interest on the payday loan for the parking meters, but we all leave feeling we have said something profound.  We did decide it’s my turn to pick up the check next time.  That’s pretty profound.  As Doug Lund says, the only difference between me and a canoe is that a canoe will occasionally tip.  We sometimes invite guest participants if they agree not to sue and not to tell what they hear to anybody who might sue…and if they’ll pick up the tab.  It’s a little scam we learned from politicians.  

Serious sidenote here:  I've seen a couple of Senator Tim Johnson's ads.  Does it seem like, in his disclaimer or proclaimer or whatever you call it in which he endorses the message, that his speech seems to have regressed rather than advanced?  Maybe it was just a bad day.  

Oh, has anybody noticed that today is 08/08/08.  I'm sure somebody has statistics on how often that happens, only once per day, per century I suppose.  I know.  That's about as exciting as watching your odometer hit all zeroes again...but the modern ones just roll right on by, don't they? 

Well, folks, buckle your seatbelts for serious and brace yourself for that airbag to explode.  The traffic roundabout, the traffic circle, is apparently a done deal even in our part of the world which is considered not only flat, but square, in every other sense. 

They’re giving lessons in roundabout driving in Sioux Falls where I find out that our first roundabout is about to open.  The article doesn’t tell me where.  I guess they want to surprise us and quite a surprise it will be to the average driver, not to mention the average drunk. 

Minnesota fell in love with the damned things a couple of years ago, putting a couple of them in places where they were destined to succeed, like the obscure rural intersection in Grand Rapids, shown below, and later in the Twin Cities burbs.   The reason they’re safer is that drivers no longer have yellow lights to run, according to one expert in one recent article.  They’re also safer if you put them where there is no traffic to begin with.  Keep in mind, this is the state that can’t keep its bridges up. 

Below are two pictures: one right after the Grand Rapids traffic circus opened (not to be confused with the Shrine Circus) and the other, taken about a week ago after the powers that be apparently lost interest in this wart in the road and are letting it revert to forest.

The Grand Rapids roundabout at its inception at an intersection

where a couple of even yield signs were less than justified. 

of safety you can no longer see what’s on the other side of the

intersection…like oncoming drunk drivers. 

I can understand this quirky traffic control in Europe where they discovered that the world was round after they started building their roads, but here?   We discovered that you can keep a grid mostly at right angles with that little gimmick, the county correction line.  The problem came up when they noticed that the longer their roads got, the more they kept running across each other.  Quite a mess for the Roman armies, I imagine.  Columbus later sorted it out by going in the wrong direction to start with.  That should have been a clue.  Besides, many of the European roundabouts and even the ones in the eastern United States are hubs for more than four streets, true traffic circles, at least the ones I have driven.  They’re a byproduct of European urban planning inflicted on our forefathers. 

If we insist on plugging round holes into square intersections, we really only need two of them; one at the North Pole and one at the South Pole where the lines of longitude converge…until global warming makes that mute several thousand years from now. 

We could put them at the equator.  No, that wouldn’t work.  The lines run parallel, like our streets, and we wouldn’t need traffic circles. 

I hope they add this bit of piloting to the drunk driver course.  Oh, well, click the play button on the video and we’ll whiz through one of these wonders of engineering, this fait accompli, this overdone deal.  Personally, I would try it first in Grand Rapids…Roundabouts 101…

By the way, the roundabouts in big cities also have multiple lanes so you’d better know where you want to come out when you go in, like Dayton’s used to be with that Oval Room in the middle.  I used to just keep walking around, faster and faster, until centrifugal force spun me to an exit, enriched like Iranian uranium.  Same concept. 

Oh, and Piccadilly Circus in London isn’t a circus…well, it’s not supposed to be…it’s a roundabout with a statue of Eros, the love god, in the middle.  I dunno.   And Leicester (pronounced Lister, like Listerine, or Lester) Square isn’t a square; it’s a roundabout. 

Hmmm. I wonder what these things cost compared to a couple of stop signs?   Oughtta be a blast when some cop pulls somebody over in the middle of one of these circuses.  They’re pretty indiscriminate about their encounters anyway.  Pull way over to the left.  I wonder how snowplow drivers like them.  They already hate cul de sacs.  Where do they pile the snow?  Do they plow in whole streets instead of driveways?   That’s more efficient.  How do you get semis through them?  Dis is gonna be fun.  Wait a minute.  They're putting it where?  Aw, jeez, that's my neighborhood.  Why not, they're dumping everything else there.

As I sit here at the computer this morning, my still ample-size stomach is growling away like Ol’ Yeller at the end of the movie just before they shot him.

I’m hungry. I’m also angry.

For some reason, the Atkins experiment has become the Atkins discouragement.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving up on losing weight but after four months of going without  potatoes, bread, pasta, starchy vegetables, milk, sugar or ice cream, I’m not seeing the kind of results that others who’ve been on this diet love to brag about;  “Yup,” they’ll say. “Dropped 35 pounds in six weeks on Atkins.” “Feel and look great. Bought a whole bunch of new slim-fitting clothes. The wife can’t keep her hands off me.”

Horse Hockey!

My knees still hurt. I’ve only managed to get from  3X to 2X, my golf pals still snicker at the site of me in shorts and Linda is perfectly content maintaining a proper ten-foot pole touching distance.

Things are about to get worse too.

I’ve been dreading it for a long time and now it’s here: SWEET CORN season!

Next to sanctification by grace, fresh-from-the-field sweet corn is God’s greatest gift to mankind. But it’s obviously off-limits to me this year and that’s why my gut is gurgling and that’s why I’m so ticked-off.

Driving past those stands along 10^th street without stopping to buy a dozen golden ears is as difficult for me as a junkie sitting at a table piled high with cocaine and not plopping his head down for a deep sniff.

Usually by this time, Hokeness has a semi trailer parked next to their vegetable stand. It arrives every morning and is stacked with 12 thousand ears of the best sweet corn I’ve ever tasted for only a dollar a dozen..provided you buy some other vegetable from them.
But the truck has been conspicuously absent this year.
Turns out this season’s crop near Adrian was damaged by hail and had to be replanted. Shipments won’t start arriving until the middle of August.

I suppose it shouldn’t make any difference to me anyway since corn is absolutely taboo on Atkins. 
But I’m feeling weak.

Instead of thinking how nice it would  be to jam my carcass into size 40 relax-fit pants again, it’s the vision of biting into a buttery, salty-sweet, perfectly cooked ear of corn with long full rows of creamy kernels, that now fills my head.

Out..out damn thought.

The kitchen smells of sausage and creamed cauliflower. Yum.

Nope, I haven’t gone Christmas crazy in July, heat happy in August, just prairie crazy.  It just came over me one day while reading the Minneapolis Strib.  I needed my periodic fix of the North Woods, where you see nothing but trees instead of nothing but grass, with all due respects to that little oasis, Gilley’s Grove over by White.  Maybe that’s what whetted my thirst for trees, just that one little sip.  I’ve always been a tree fiend. 

The paper gave me the rationalization.  The Duluth Maritime Festival was kicking off with the arrival of three tall sailing ships, two of them warships.  I had to go, so I dumped the dog with my son, dumped my meager schedule…a haircut and the Trooien yard party…and took off. 

I drove to my sister’s place (free lodging) in five acres of Grand Rapids forest on Wednesday.  On Thursday, she and I headed for the port city, leaving her husband in his recliner watching Regis.  

Duluth, across the water from Parks Point.  Unlike much of Lake Superior,
Parks Point has fine sand beaches. 

Duluth has a good eye for spectacle, but is pretty shortsighted on implementation.  The best vantage points for the arrival are either along the ship canal (jammed early) or Parks Point which is a long, peninsular island joined to the rest of Duluth by the lift bridge which is up and down all day allowing everything from sailboats to ore ships to grain tankers into the harbor.  It’s a two-lane bridge, so today it’s a bottleneck.  My thought is: “Why not run shuttle buses from rendezvous points that are less congested?”  Hey, it’s the North Woods. Too much thought would destroy the plaid-clad ambience.  
 

I have to hand it to Duluth.  The city has cleaned up the seedy waterfront into a great array of bars and bistros.  They’ve even lured the big franchise restaurants that usually hang around the malls downtown, along with a lot of locals, like “Hell’s Kitchen, above, proclaiming it has “damn good food.”  This is what Downtown Sioux Falls should put more serious effort into.  You can walk the whole district in Duluth.  The shootings and knifings are way up the hill.  

The time of the arrival is also vague.  First reports had it between noon and three.  Then it was four to five.  4:30 turns out to be right and, after two trips through the traffic on the lift bridge, we find ourselves in the right place at the right time on Parks Point.  Just in time to catch the cannons and watch the sails go slack for the trip through the canal.  Not quite as spectacular as when we spotted them under full sail out in Lake Superior that morning, especially that 198 foot square rigger. 

Two tall ships await a rendevous with the third for the grand entry. 

The weather couldn’t have been more perfect; blue skies, a nice nautical breeze off Lake Superior, and not many people where we were.  I also have a little fun with somebody else’s car alarm when I discover the remote entry for my truck sets off the alarm on a Subaru Outback.  That was fun. 

I briefly entertained the thought of coming back to tour the ships the next day, but I’ve been on the Cutty Sark and the Mayflower replica, and it’s the spectacle I’ve come for, not the crowd.  That turns out to be a wise choice.  Watching the news, I see that even people who’ve bought their tickets in February wind up waiting five hours for the three-ship tour, the three ship tour, five hours on a stifling couple of days.  The organizers extend the hours and offer refunds for those who give up.  Again, I raise the issue of that implementation thing.  But I get what I’ve come for. 

Click the play button on the video, pause it for a few seconds instead of five hours and enjoy the tall ships in the air conditioned comfort of your eight foot ceiling…

Still ahead from the North Woods, Zimmie’s Restaurant in Hibbing, Dylan fans, an ice cream cone in Ely and Tall Timber Days in Grand Rapids.  The tall ships used to be tall timber. 

My back is really aching after playing golf every day this past week. 
It’s not that I want to play so much, you understand, I’m retired and it’s the law.

On several occasions recently, my friend Denny Graves and I have teed ‘em up. 
We play to about the same handicap and have tested our limited skills at the Westward Ho Country Club, Brandon Golf Course, Spring Creek, Watertown Muni, Six Mile Creek in White and at Rocky Run in Dell Rapids. (more about that in a minute)

On each occasion, the weather has been absolutely perfect for golf; a rarity in these parts, and without fail one of us will comment during  a round about how the lush, green, picturesque pastoral settings of golf courses must be what heaven is like. 
“Maybe without all the swearing,” Denny says. 

The view from 18 toward the clubhouse; heavenly.

It’s true. Despite a concentrated effort to keep emotions in check after a lousy shot or missed putt, bad language..in varying degrees of severity..often, and uncontrollably,  boils up and erupts from our lips.

Oh sure, we are always repentant after each profane outburst; asking that our French be pardoned as if the French had anything to do with it; Je pue au golf et blâme le diable. (I stink at golf and blame the devil.)

Yes, it’s true. I do blame the evil one. 
I’m convinced that Beelzebub himself…the great deceiver..lurks amid the serine settings of golf courses just waiting for the chance to make us forsake all the principles we’ve held dear since Sunday School.

Dell Rapids..deceptively beautiful.

He has his favorite hang outs and seems to be fond of the number twelve.

For example, hole number 12 at Spring Creek where Lucifer causes about  75 percent of the balls to go flying into the creek in front and to the left or into the trees on the right. It’s the same story at number 12 at Willow Run and at 12 in Brandon except its more water on the right instead of trees. 
These holes have caused young ministers fresh out of seminary to lose composure, take the Lord’s name in vane and fling drivers up to a hundred yards or more.

But perhaps nowhere will you hear George Carlin’s 7 words you can’t say on television more often than on hole number 16 at Dell Rapids.
It’s beautiful to behold with a babbling brook meandering through the fairway but it is the gateway to hell. Not only do you have to cross the water three times you must also hit a small green that slopes forward. 

Dell Rapids #16. The devil lives here.

After Denny and I both took triple bogy eights.. spoiling our scores for the day..we laughed sarcastically over those earlier comments we’d made about golf courses being a little slice of heaven on earth. 

Not today &*%$!*^&%!!

Pardon my French.

Sioux Falls experienced what is called a convective heat burst last night with temperatures reaching 101 degrees for 1 minute.  Wind damage was also reported with the heat burst.  It is definitely a strange occurance but conditions were nearly perfect for a Heat Burst last night.  Here are some more details from the National Weather Service:

Between 415 am and 445 am CDT this Sunday morning August 3rd, the city of Sioux Falls experienced a convective heat burst. Temperatures rose rapidly from the lower 70s to  101 degrees in a very short time. This rapid rise in temperature was also associated with wind gusts of 50 to 60 mph and a rapid drop in dew points. The official high temperature will be 99 degrees as with automated weather stations, only the 5 minute mean temperature and dew point are used.  

A heat burst occurs when warm air from 10,000 to 20,000 feet above the surface is forced to the ground.  Typically when air comes down to the surface with thunderstorms, it is much colder than the air at the surface.  However, especially during the late night and morning, very warm air can be forced to the surface if the air reaches the surface without rainfall occurring.  When this happens, the temperature will rise as much as 30 degrees, and the dew point will drop by 20 to 30 degrees. Heat bursts are also accompanied by strong to damaging winds.  However, unlike many cases with damaging thunderstorm winds, little to no rain will fall when the heat burst occurs.  This is because if it were to rain, the air would rapidly cool and moisten due to evaporation.

A graph of the temperatures recorded from our WeatherNet site at the Pavillion is below.  You can clearly see where the temperatures shot up and the dewpoints crashed right around 4 am.

Is it just some primal hunter/gatherer instinct that comes out from time to time? 

Is it a love of farm machinery that I’ve had since I sat my first tractor? 

Or was it that old Alan Ladd-Robert Preston movie “Wild Harvest,” a standard Hollywood mellow drama with the forces of good and evil opposing each other as custom combiners in a wheat field?  How old?  I was two when it was made.  

30 thousand acres of wheat await an onslaught of combines west of Fort Pierre.  That’s one farm.

Whatever it is, I can’t pass up a good harvest.  There’s a finality to seeing the results of our short growing seasons beat the odds and wind up in a bin where it faces the final challenge; the price.  Was it worth the harvest?

But it’s the process I like the best, American wheat or corn gracefully bowing before a synchronized ballet of man and machine.  That ballet has spun a long way from that 1947 Alan Ladd movie that centered on a woman and grand theft, wheat.  The machines are bigger, the farms are bigger and, as I found out recently to the endless wheat fields west of Fort Pierre, women are in the cabs of the combines.

What looks like a shelterbelt on the horizon, a tank column,  is really 19 combines, each 36 feet wide, waiting to swallow the wheat like a swarm of locusts.

Turn up the audio, hit the play button, pause it for a while and see if this operation doesn’t remind you of the B-24 and B-17 bombing runs of World War II, right down to the radio chatter.

Why do farmers hire harvesters?  Because it just doesn’t make good economic sense to keep 19 combines at a third-of-a-million dollars each on the books just to use them for a few hurried weeks a year.   Chad Olsen keeps his busy for months instead of weeks, leap frogging the harvest from Texas to Canada.  Two of his combines were already on their way to Montana when I shot this story Monday afternoon, July 28. 

Olsen has to be about the biggest custom outfit in the country, which probably holds true for the world, too.  A Dutch family also spent a good deal of their afternoon watching the harvest spectacle. 

“I have crossed the Rubicon.”  Julius Caesar said that in 49 B.C. during one of his Roman Empire annexation campaigns.  It has come to mean that we have passed a point of no return.  I don’t know if Julie had a bridge, but mankind has certainly developed a love affair with them in the intervening 20 centuries.   You can hardly think of a war movie that doesn’t have a crucial bridge: The Bridges of Toko Re, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, The Bridge on the River Kwai.  Bridges are so popular that armies spend a fair amount of life and materiel trying to conquer or destroy other people’s bridges while defending their own. 

We love bridges so much that we build them where we don’t need them.  Some say that bridge across the Missouri at Vermillion is one of those, emptying into the emptiness of Nebraska.  But there are even more frivolous examples.  Golf clubs love bridges.  I came across two of them in Tyler, Minnesota, either one of which can easily be circumvented without wetting a golf shoe.  

There’s a second bridge just beyond the culvert, upper left, in Tyler.  The bridge as Six Mile Creek golf course in White, South Dakota, below, does actually ford Six Mile Creek, nestled into the abutment of a former railroad bridge.  

 

Same with this pair of curvaceous bridges just outside Clara City, Minnesota, near Willmar.

The Kiwanis International Bridge in Hendricks, Minnesota, does bridge the headwaters of the Lac Qui Parle River, but you could go an extra hundred feet and take the road. 

The closest we have to the romance of the Bridges of Madison County, at least in this area, is Omer and Ileen Ness’s covered bridge (below) in their little park east of Hendricks.  It does span a creek.  No romance here; it houses a lawnmower.
 

There is almost a covered bridge just west of Elkton, South Dakota.  I suspect this is one of those cases in which the need was created to justify the bridge.  The vaguely Asian looking span crosses to a manmade island in a manmade pond. 

Had it been a couple of miles in the other direction, it could have bridged the state line, an equally imaginative mission, bridging a non-physical gap in life philosophies that often runs as deep as any river.  Where the heck is the Rubicon, anyway? 

Linda absolutely loves the summertime. In fact, she starts fretting about it being over on the very first day it begins because the summer solstice means that days will start getting shorter again and before you know it..bam..it’ll be time to unpack the bulk knit sweaters and start planning Christmas dinner.

For me, the sure sign we’ve turned the corner on the season is when we can no longer sit out on the deck in the evening without yelling at each other.
It’s not that we’re fighting. 
It’s because those  #&*%@ cicadas are back buzzing away in the treetops so loudly you can’t hear yourself think much less carry on a conversation. 

Aww. Innee cute? A dog-day cicada now appearing with a cast of thousands in a tree near you.

Cicadas are apparently quite a freak of nature in that some species stay buried in the ground for up to 17 years before arising out of the earth in mass to annoy the planet.
We have mostly dog-day cicadas around here which show up annually during the dog days of summer to bug us.  
Actually, it’s only the boy cicadas that make all the racket. And, as you might suspect, it all has to do with sex.

For some reason, God, in His infinite wisdom, created these creatures with hollow chambers next to their bellies that when compressed back and forth sounds something like the noise you make by pushing down on the top of an empty pop can..only multiplied a hundred  times a second.

The idea is to get the attention of girl cicadas…to lure them over for dinner, dancing and a little roll in the tree leaves. 
When you get thousands of these sex starved cicadas all screaching out their love songs at once, it’s louder and even more annoying than when both my neighbors decide to fire up their muffler-less lawn mowers at the same time. 
Air National Guard F-16 jet fighters can fly right over the house and not be heard above the cicada mating call.

When I played drums with Mogen’s Heroes band, we had to crank up the volume each time we performed the August concerts at McKennan Park because of competition from millions of those blasted bugs.

It turns out, though, that not everyone hates them. In fact, there are actually entire web sites devoted to cicadas. Many people find their constant buzz to be soothing rather than excruciating and their appearance to be beautiful rather than like a monster from a cheap Japanese horror movie.

Some cultures also find them delicious and an excellent source of protein. 
Okay, that’s really disgusting but I almost think I’d rather eat a cicada than have to listen to one.

I wonder if they’re on the Atkins diet.